


The spin I'm in

by longnationalnightmare



Category: Pod Save America (RPF)
Genre: Anal Fingering, Barebacking, Blowjobs, Coming Untouched, Jealousy, Just the Tip, M/M, Mildly Dubious Consent, Misunderstandings, Oral Sex, Sex Pollen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-08
Updated: 2018-03-08
Packaged: 2019-03-28 15:17:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 27,409
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13906776
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/longnationalnightmare/pseuds/longnationalnightmare
Summary: hello there, it’s me / I’m the Santa Ana winds/ here's some magic dust / which will make things weird





	The spin I'm in

**Author's Note:**

> As always, this story exists only because head coach/cheerleader/sounding board/audiencer extraordinaire drunktuesdays and world's best co-plotter & tireless beta kalpurna endured a whole lotta whining, moaning, groaning, and melodramatic messages along the lines of "I can't," and "THIS IS HARD," and "UGGGGHHHHHHHHHH," and, instead of blocking me on all platforms, firmly forced me to keep writing. Without them, all my fic is just a glint in the milkman's eye. A long, unpunctuated, gerund-infested glint.

In the urgent care afterwards, Lovett did his best to make Jon clear off. “This is stupid,” he said, rapping his knuckles against the plastic arm of his seat, staring down at his neon Nikes. “It’s clearly me. Something wrong with me.”  
  
“I think,” Jon said, and then, “I’m pretty sure,” and then, indistinctly, “—both of us.” He sounded calm enough. He was holding a copy of Men’s Health (ha!) open in his lap, hands horribly steady, although he hadn’t turned a page in ten minutes, so—  
  
“What, are you worried you hurt me?” Lovett said. “Because you didn’t. Okay?”  
  
“Okay,” Jon said.  
  
“I’m _fine_ ,” Lovett snapped, louder.  
  
It came out mean, a little, but Jon didn’t flinch. “Okay,” he said again. He didn’t even have the decency to seem spooked—just looked up, expression mild, and said, “Let’s both just get tested, alright?”  
  
The joke was on him, anyway, because of course they didn’t get taken back together. The nurse called for Jon first, beckoning impatiently when he lingered for a long moment, looking at Lovett as if to say, _should I—?_ , until Lovett said, “Favs, for Chrissake, _go_.” Anyone else might have appreciated this unqualified release after the events of the evening—but of course Jon Favreau had to remind the room that he was one warhorse short of knighthood.  
  
“Don’t leave without me,” he told Lovett, finally.  
  
“You drove,” Lovett said. He watched narrowly as Jon crossed the room, passed through the swinging doors, and was gone.  
  
Someone came along for Lovett, too, after another ten minutes or so of staring at the white waiting room wall and shifting in the hard seat, trying not to think about why he couldn’t get comfortable. She led him back through a maze of hallways and installed him in a grim little room, took his pulse, his temperature; made him pee into a cup; asked a lot of frankly invasive questions about who’d done what to whom, and put what where, and whether it had all been—  
  
“Yes, of _course_ consensual,” Lovett snapped. “Inasmuch as we were, like.”  
  
“What?” she asked gently.  
  
Lovett focused his eyes on a rack of STD pamphlets hanging on the wall behind her head. “I don’t know,” he said. “We were _roofied_ , I don’t _know_ , you tell _me_.”  
  
After that, she drew a blood sample ( _three tries_ to find a vein, unbelievable) and went away again, leaving Lovett alone.  
  
They shouldn’t have come here. That seemed clear, now, a couple hours in. Whose idea had it been? Jon’s, it had definitely been Jon’s idea—“Have you ever heard of repression?” Lovett had said acidly, and Jon had said, “Yeah, but first let’s make sure it’s not,” and Lovett had said _what_ , and Jon had said, “gonna happen again?”    
  
Well, that’s why Jon got paid the big bucks. He never missed an annual check-up. He got his teeth cleaned twice a year. _Preventative care_.  
  
Not that it _mattered_ , anyway, since eventually the doctor came back and said, no sign of anything in his blood or his urine, and, yes, vitals normal, and had Lovett been drinking? Any history of mental illness—paranoia—“It’s allergy season,” the doctor offered, finally, although his tone said, a little bit, _we all fuck someone we didn’t mean to every now and then._  
  
“So do you write me a prescription for Benadryl?” Lovett sniped, hands tucked under his thighs. “Or is it still over the counter?”  
  
“Well—” the doctor started.  
  
“I’d like to go home now,” Lovett interrupted, and flexed his fingers against the crinkly paper of the exam table.  
  
On the way out, the nurse who’d escorted him in put a hand on his arm and said, “Honey, are you… do you feel safe?”  
  
“In the Urgent Care?” he asked.  
  
“With your friend,” she said. She looked tired, bangs pinned back with a bobby pin, and kind, like if he said _no,_ she’d help him figure something out. He oughta thank her. He oughta thank her for caring, for seeing his hunched shoulders, his furrowed brow, and thinking, I want to help—I want to help you if I can. _You definitely can’t_ , he thought bleakly.  
  
“—I’m thirty- _five_ ,” he said instead.  
  
The nurse looked unimpressed.  
  
“Sorry,” he said. “Seriously, it’s fine.” And, after a pause, “It was _seriously_ consensual, God, I can’t believe you made me get into this again.”  
  
“Take care of yourself,” she sighed, and left him by the exit.  
  
In the car, Lovett rested his forehead against the cold window and tried with limited success not to look, even peripherally, at Jon, who was driving with his hands at ten and two, regulation, t-shirt sleeves stretched to the point of straining around his biceps. Jon hadn’t turned the radio on, so Lovett didn’t either. Neither of them spoke until they were nearly halfway back, when Jon said, abruptly, “Well—”  
  
“ _That_ was a waste of time,” Lovett said, because if anyone was gonna talk it _was_ gonna be him.  
  
Jon took a hand off the steering wheel to knead at his own shoulder. “Yeah,” he said.  
  
“And it was _your_ idea,” Lovett added.  
  
“Did they look at—”  
  
“You didn’t _hurt_ me!” Lovett yelped. “We can’t talk about this anymore!”  
  
“I know,” Jon said.  
  
“ _Ever_ ,” Lovett said, and Jon said, “I _know_ ,” and then, “Are you sure—” and Lovett said, “If you say one more word, I am going to roll down this window and scream that you’re—kidnapping me!”  
  
Jon turned his head a little at that. “You’re thirty-five,” he said skeptically.  
  
“Adults get abducted all the time!” Lovett said. It would be nice, he thought, if he could modulate his own voice, which sounded shrill and crazed and dangerously close to cracking, but sometimes you could control your body and sometimes—“They get sold as sex slaves!” Bad, bad, rewind—“And for. Organs!”  
  
“Who would want your organs,” Jon said. He’d put his hand back on the wheel. Good. No more pawing at his own broad shoulders, making a big show of how tense the bunched muscles back there were, how desperately he needed to de-stress, take a load off— _Tommy saying, laughingly, you_ really _gotta get laid, man, Jon laughing back—_ ”You don’t take care of them. Pickled in Diet Coke.”  
  
“You _wish_ you had organs like these,” Lovett said.  
  
“Sure,” Jon said.  
  
Lovett stared out the window, watching as neon signs and flood-lit billboards flew by. What he wanted, he thought, was to be somewhere really, truly dark—his own bedroom, maybe, with black blinds drawn to block out the sunrise—or in, say, a deep hole in the ground, miles of dirt above his head—or way at the back of some cave along the coast of the Mediterranean, one of those ones you could only access via an underwater entrance—or in, like, a sensory deprivation tank. If some trusting idiot let Lovett climb fully clothed into a sensory deprivation tank right now, they’d have to call the cops to haul him back out. He could stay in a sensory deprivation tank for days—weeks—for a million years—and still not be ready, in his current condition, to return to his actual life.  
  
When Jon finally parked the car in front of his house, neither of them moved immediately to unbuckle their seatbelts or open their doors. It was dark out. It had still been light when they left, but only just: the soft, handspun light of the early evening. Now the streetlamps were on, which should have been normal—how long had Lovett lived here? Years, now—but somehow the whole neighborhood seemed strange, like someplace he’d never been before.  
  
“Well,” Lovett said. He was looking out the window at Jon’s lawn, the big bird of paradise near his front stoop. Without meaning to, he let his gaze drift sideways to the stoop itself, the welcome mat, the green door—  
  
“Lovett,” Jon said.  
  
That was enough to make Lovett actually start moving. “This never happened,” he said, reaching for the door handle. “See? This is cool, it’s like we’re in a movie—”  
  
“Lovett—”  
  
“—or, like, witness protection—”  
  
“You would be horrible in witness protection,” Jon said.  
  
“What _ever_ ,” Lovett said. “I’m just saying, we have, like, a terrible secret—”  Out of the corner of his eye, Lovett saw Jon flinch. _Don’t touch it—don’t think_ don’t touch it _—_ fuck, fuck _fuck_ —“So now we just have to keep it,” Lovett barreled on, “for the rest of our lives. Okay? We never talk about it again. Okay?”  
  
“That does always work out great in the movies,” Jon said. He sounded tired. Not looking at him was hard. Lovett should have asked that nice nurse for a pair of horse blinders. _“Of course it was consensual, I just don’t know how I’m ever gonna meet his eyes again—”_  
  
Lovett un-clicked his seatbelt determinedly. He opened the car door. He climbed out, the back of his neck prickling a little. Probably just the breeze.  
  
“Lovett—”  
  
“What part of never talk about—”  
  
“One thing,” Jon said, “seriously, just. Can you—”  
  
“Is this _really_ the moment to demand eye contact?” Lovett said, but he turned around again and made himself stand still, hands at his sides, looking into the car.  
  
“I didn’t say it,” Jon said. He sounded a little abashed, hand raised again to scrub at the back of his neck.  
  
“Well,” Lovett said, “I’ve known you for like ten years, so.”  
  
Jon didn’t say _anything_ for a long moment. He looked, Lovett thought, about as tired as he’d sounded, his jaw set and dark with stubble. Now that he’d been given the floor, he seemed uncharacteristically at a loss. Generally, when Jon decided to speak, he knew what he wanted to say, unlike Lovett, who never knew what he wanted at all. “Well?” Lovett said again, finally. He needed—the thought was repetitive, insistent, almost frantic—to _leave_ , he needed to leave already, he needed to be anywhere but here—  
  
“If you,” Jon said. “If.” He glanced across the steering wheel and then, shoulders visibly steeling, back at Lovett. “If you feel weird—”  
  
“I feel weird,” Lovett said, knee-jerk, and Jon snapped, “About _me_ ,” which shut him up.  
  
“If you feel weird about me,” Jon said again. “If I’m doing it wrong.”  
  
“Doing what wrong?”  
  
“Being normal,” Jon said, and laughed humorlessly, like he couldn’t believe his own inarticulateness. Finally, with a great push: “You have to say something if you start to hate me.”  
  
“If _I_ start to hate—that’s so,” Lovett said, “ _fucking_ stupid, I don’t even know what to do with it.”  
  
“Just promise me,” Jon said.  
  
“...I promise,” Lovett said. “Moron.” Then, trying hard to sound calm, he said, “I’ll see you tomorrow.” He closed the car door carefully— _too_ carefully, he’d never been that fucking careful with a door in his life—and walked unhurriedly across the road. _Don’t look like you’re fleeing, look like you’re_ fine, _one foot in front of the other, almost there._  
  
He wanted to look back. He didn’t. Instead, he kept his eyes trained on the front door, fumbled his keys out of his pocket. He had the strange feeling that his body might fly apart at any second, that he was begging it not to: begging his hands not to shake, begging the key to slide into the lock, begging the house to let him in, which it did, finally, thankfully, and he was inside. The door slammed shut behind him. He was inside and no one could see him anymore.  
  
  
  
Lovett let Pundit out back to pee and looked around his kitchen for something to drink, but there wasn’t anything, really. Usually, if he’d run out of something, he’d just cross the street and steal Jon’s, but.  
  
There were a couple of La Croix in the fridge. Not what he’d had in mind; who cared. He leaned against the kitchen island and chugged one, crunched the can, then cracked a second one open and didn’t touch it. His face felt flushed. He put the can against his cheek and left it there until Pundit started scratching at the back door and he had to let her in.  
  
Then he went upstairs to shower.  
  
The water was hot, which was good: it made his face feel almost cool again by comparison. After he’d stood under the spray for a while, he managed to stop watching rivulets of water run down the tile wall across from him and actually glance down at his own body, which looked—mostly the same, it turned out. There were—he craned his neck a little to see—full sets of fingerprints on both his hips, the kind of faint red marks he knew from experience would darken within a day. Jon’s hands, Lovett thought dimly, had turned out to be—somehow broader than he would’ve thought. He’d looked at them a million times. How could he not have known how big they were, or at least, how big they’d feel—?  
  
_Don’t think about that,_ he thought, and touched one of the marks. Jon had held him so _hard._ How many times had he come, earlier? Three, at least, which hadn’t happened since he was sixteen and so perpetually horny it was a struggle not to jack off in the middle of Calc BC—and now he could feel his dick stirring _again_ , God, he had to _not_ —  
  
Lovett turned the water off. He didn’t touch himself. He tried not to think about whether this felt like a—what? Genuine hard-on? Or like… whatever had happened earlier.  
  
He almost wasn’t sure which was the worse option.  
  
In bed, Pundit curled up next to him, Lovett browsed Twitter, trying to stop his brain from churning. It was a rare quiet news day—not _nothing_ happening, but the nearest to nothing you could expect this close to the end times. Tommy was fighting with some guy from the Washington Post. Jon hadn’t tweeted since before—whatever—but he’d liked something from about half an hour ago. Not that Lovett should be checking, which he wasn’t, what _ever._ He tossed his phone onto the nightstand.  
  
He managed to lie in bed, trying to will himself to sleep, for a full five minutes before he cracked and got up. He walked heavily through the dark to the window and looked across the street. There were no lights on in Jon’s house. He’d probably already passed out. He’d probably been asleep for—pretty much since they got home, because Jon was—Jon was— _well-adjusted_ , Lovett landed on, and pulled the blackout blinds down, crawled back into bed. He didn’t bother setting an alarm. What was the point of being independently employed if, after something like this, you couldn’t—if, after something like _this_ —like _what_? What was this _like_?  
  
He had to stop thinking about this.  
  
He had to be more like Jon, that’s what he should focus on. Jon was doing fine. Jon had probably—  
  
_Stop thinking about what Jon’s doing. Stop thinking about Jon, period. Stop thinking about—_  
  
He counted sheep for a while. He gave each sheep the face of a different Republican, and imagined them leaping one by one over the edge of the fiscal cliff. One. Two. Three. Four.  
  
Somewhere around thirty-seven, lazily thumbing the soft skin of his hip, he fell asleep.  
  
  
  
In the waiting room at Urgent Care, Lovett had had plenty of time to consider The Incident from every angle. If called upon to provide a timeline of the afternoon’s events—in a court of law, or in response to Tommy’s disbelieving, “You what?” should he ever find out about any of this (which, in Lovett’s opinion, he never, ever, ever should)— Lovett could do it. He could timestamp it. He could—  
  
“Okay,” the nurse had said patiently, “but can you tell _me_?”  
  
The inarguable facts of the matter were these:  
  
At 6:13 PM on Thursday, Lovett had exited his house, locking the door behind him. He’d been carrying nothing but his phone, wallet in his back pocket, planning to take a drive, maybe, maybe hit up a bar—or, more likely, a Starbucks. Hiis life was, he’d been thinking, less glamorous than people might assume. Well, some people. Surely some people thought of him as the kind of rich, successful, attractive new-money mogul who had parties or app launches or fundraising events to attend just about every night of the week.  
  
It should have been so straightforward. He’d thought about that for a full, fierce minute in the Urgent Care. He should have gotten into his car, driven away, done something mundane, come home. None of this should have happened at all. And it _wouldn’t_ have, except that Jon had been jogging up the street, finishing a run, just as Lovett got to his car. “Hot date?” he’d said, smiling so the gap between his teeth showed and shading his eyes with one hand.  
  
Lovett had crossed his arms as if to ward the image off. “Wouldn’t you like to know.”  
  
“Not really,” Jon said. “Can you come take a look at something before you leave?”  
  
“Business or pleasure?”  
  
“Pleasure,” Jon said. “As in, it’s a pleasure to operate a start-up with such an industrious, attentive CFO at the helm.”  
  
“Am I getting paid overtime for this, Secretary Favreau?” Lovett asked, tossing his keys from hand to hand. Jon’s face had looked—sweaty.  
  
“You’re not getting paid anything for this,” Jon said. He’d crossed to his house without looking back, like he knew Lovett would follow.  
  
Lovett didn’t _have_ to follow.  
  
He’d crossed the street, too.  
  
Jon had been fumbling to untie the drawstring of his shorts when Lovett caught up with him at his front door, house key hanging from one loop. “Sorry,” he said, distracted, “double-knotted.”  
  
“Good grief,” Lovett said. It had been a cool, breezy evening after a long, too-warm week. Jon’s head was bent in concentration, and the fine hairs on his forearms were standing up where his skin was prickling as it cooled.  
  
And then—it had been hard to try and track this part, but Lovett was pretty sure—there’d been a particularly strong gust of wind—not cool, this time—strange-smelling, dense and hot and panting. It had felt like someone breathing on every inch of his body at once, the sensation so unexpected he’d felt almost dizzy as it hit him, high and lightheaded, eyes still fixed on Jon’s arms, which had—stilled—key in hand, finally, but he wasn’t moving—  
  
“Uh,” Jon had said after a long moment, raising his head slowly, incredibly slowly, with the look of an animal stunned. His eyes had been dark, pupils huge. He looked—  
  
“He looked—” the nurse had prompted.  
  
“Good,” Lovett had said defeatedly, and then, sharper, “Well, he always does,” but this had been different. It had. Lovett was used to glancing up from his computer to find the sun hitting Jon’s face just so. He was used to Jon coming over after a run, sweaty in that way that looked an awful lot like glowing, lifting the hem of his shirt to wipe his face off while he talked and revealing the firm muscles of his stomach, the trail of dark hair disappearing into his shorts. Lovett was inoculated against that shit. It was background noise. It was one long miracle that he managed each day to pretend was nothing—normal—not noteworthy at all.  
  
This, though—  
  
In the span of a second, Jon had gone from looking handsome to looking—“Fuck,” Lovett had said. He’d felt his heart rate pick up, palms starting to sweat. Lovett had promised himself a long time ago never to see Jon like this for more than a second, no matter how relentlessly he had to quash the odd accidental shock of possibility, of pushy, near-irrepressible desire _._ He’d _promised_ himself, and he’d meant it. Jon was off-limits. _Wanting_ Jon was off-limits. Even thinking about a world in which Jon _wasn’t_ off-limits… second verse, same as the first. It wasn’t a complicated rule: just a big mess of caution tape. No; _no_ ; not for you; not ever.  
  
So it would have been bad enough that Lovett couldn’t stop himself, suddenly, from looking. But of course, what made it a million times worse: Jon was looking back.  
  
“Fuck,” Lovett said again. Had he done drugs and—what—forgotten about it? He didn’t even know where to _get_ drugs these days. His hands were tingling. He needed to touch Jon. _Don’t you_ dare _,_ he told his body, but he was reaching out anyway, and Jon was reaching back, saying, “Lovett, I don’t—” and taking Lovett’s face in his big hands, one thumb resting on Lovett’s lower lip, stroking.  
  
“What are you doing,” Lovett said, voice strained. Jon was peering at Lovett like he’d never seen him before, lips parted, face hungry and wondering.  
  
“What are _you_ doing,” Jon said, which was when Lovett realized he had a hand fully up the back of Jon’s gross, sweaty shirt, spread flat against his damp skin, and that he was sucking the tip of Jon’s thumb into his mouth. It tasted salty. Lovett’s chest felt tight.  
  
“Oh my God,” Lovett said.  
  
“ _Oh_ ,” Jon said. He tugged his thumb free and stroked his open hand down Lovett’s neck, down across his pecs and stomach, cupping Lovett’s cock without warning, shameless, and leaning in to kiss the hollow of Lovett’s throat, to scrape his teeth across the jut of Lovett’s Adam’s apple.  
  
“Jon, God, _stop_ ,” Lovett said, hips hitching forward against Jon’s hand. He was hard—zero to sixty—and hot. He could feel his face flushing with confusion, humiliation, a kind of pounding arousal he couldn’t control or understand.  
  
“You stop,” Jon said. He sounded drunk. It had happened again—Lovett was squeezing Jon’s ass, it turned out, and tipping his head back to let Jon suck kisses across his collarbone, grinding forward like he was trying to ride Jon’s thigh. Then: “Sorry, fuck, sorry, sorry,” Jon was saying, and his mouth was gone, his thigh was gone, his big hands were gone; he wasn’t _touching_ Lovett anymore, which was the worst thing that had literally ever happened in Lovett’s _life_.  
  
Lovett groaned, once, long, and shook his head to clear his vision. Jon was a half step away, fists clenched, breathing heavily. He was holding himself tense, body taut, shaking visibly with the effort of—“I _can’t_ ,” Jon said, “I don’t know what’s happening, I can’t—” and Lovett had known what he meant because he _couldn’t_ either.  
  
Lovett had felt drawn to people before, plenty of people, but this was attraction on steroids: it was weaponized want. Being this far from Jon—half a _foot_ , he screamed to himself, but every inch ached like a mile—was making him feel sick. Lovett noticed, dimly, that at some point in the last fevered minute, Jon had unbuttoned Lovett’s jeans, slid the zipper down—when the _fuck_ had he found the time—and that the slick red head of his own dick was visible above the waistband of his damp briefs, right here on Jon’s front stoop, in broad daylight—broad _ish_ daylight—and that—  
  
“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” Jon was saying, except that in the five seconds Lovett had spent trying to get his bearings, Jon had dropped to his knees, and was looking up at Lovett, face open and desperate and needy, and Lovett’s hand was tugging his underwear down the littlest bit more without permission, drawing his own fat dick out.  
  
He had to stop. He _had_ to. If he told his body what to do— _let go, step away, turn around,_ run—it would have to do it. That was how bodies _worked_. Instead, his other hand moved without permission to cup the back of Jon’s head, fingers sliding into his damp hair. Jon’s eyes were dark. His mouth was open, and he was breathing fast. When Lovett tightened his fingers and pressed Jon’s face forward, he came easily, made no objection, and Lovett found himself saying, the words coming unbidden, “God, you look so good,” jacking himself involuntarily against Jon’s cheek, smearing it slick. _Say no_ , he thought wildly, _say no and tell me to stop_ , but Jon just turned into the motion and suckled without warning at the head of Lovett’s cock, wet and sweet and unpracticed, eyes closed as he applied himself to the task. His lashes were long and dark. His face was beautiful. He’d never put his mouth on a cock before and now he was kissing Lovett’s, sucking clumsily, trying to take more, more, greedy and wanting, and it felt so _good_ —  
  
“Fuck, _Jon,”_ Lovett said, stiffening, and yanked him up by his hair, the gesture more violent than he’d meant for it to be. Jon seemed barely to notice, dazed and keening to be let back down. His mouth was plush and red.  
  
“Mm?” Jon had said, and then, “Oh. _Oh_ ,” but he was clinging to Lovett’s arm anyway, tight enough to make it seem like a joke when he said, “I need—sorry—sorry, sorry, just _go_ , just leave—”  
  
Jesus. “I _can’t_ ,” Lovett said wildly. His hips were still shifting, cock jerking against his stomach like it missed Jon’s mouth, and he kept rutting forward until suddenly Jon’s hand was on his dick, his long, shockingly delicate fingers wrapped around Lovett’s _dick_. “Give me the key, Jon, Jesus,” Lovett snapped, and scrabbled at Jon’s other hand until he unfolded it compliantly. The burnished metal glinted a smug short—long—short—in the setting sun as Lovett fumbled with it. He managed to wrench himself free, jam it into the door, and shove them both inside. There was no time to close it again before they were halfway into the foyer, Lovett’s pants around his ankles while he yanked at Jon’s shirt, _off, off, off,_ crazed with it.  
  
“Timestamp?” Lovett imagined some bewigged defender of law and order asking, but of course he didn’t know, the same way he didn’t know, actually, _any_ of the inarguable facts of the matter.  
  
He did know, though, that that was the point at which they clearly weren’t gonna (Jon’s fingers tight on Lovett’s hip, driving Lovett into the living room, reaching round to grope his ass) stop.  
  
Jon had backed Lovett onto the sofa, the two of them staggering off their feet, Jon’s hands already under Lovett’s shirt, insistent, wrenching it over his head until Lovett’s arms were trapped, then pausing for a moment, breathing heavily, to look down at Lovett. His gaze had swept across Lovett’s small, pink nipples (of all things to feel self-conscious about, during _or_ after—) while he shucked his own pants off.  
  
His dick was—normal, Lovett had tried to think, but whatever drug they were on said _perfect_ and then Lovett’s actual hindbrain said _perfect_ too, even though he’d spent ten years teaching it not to pull that kind of shit.  
  
Jon had freed Lovett’s arms, then bent and rubbed his rough cheek against Lovett’s pecs, one and then the other and then the first again, until Lovett’s chest was mottled red. He’d bitten each nipple in turn, too, until they were pebbled and raw, while Lovett’s dick leaked and jerked against his stomach. Lovett had been panting, trying to find words that he wouldn’t regret later—trying to imagine standing up, walking away. He couldn’t. He knew that he couldn’t. His fingers were digging into the meat of Jon’s shoulder so hard he was gonna leave marks. Stand up? Walk away? He’d groaned, arched up into Jon’s mouth, and squirmed when Jon rutted against his leg, scratching up through the hair on Lovett’s stomach, biting the delicate skin on the inside of Lovett’s bicep. Jon barely been speaking, grunting a little; he’d been like an animal.  
  
_Lovett_ had been like an animal.  
  
Fuck it, they’d both been like animals, what the hell, it’s not like it cost extra to say _everyone was crazy—neither one of us was in our right mind_.  
  
The feeling was halfway between a tactile, hazy high and slamming coke, and Lovett had almost thought he could ride it out like that, face to face, take it for what it was, until Jon paused for a moment; kissed the nipple he’d been biting; kissed it so softly, so kindly, that all at once Lovett felt like he might cry. “No,” he said abruptly, and Jon hmmed, still rutting against Lovett’s leg. “No,” he said again, and then, “No, Jon, _no_ —”  
  
Jon had been dating someone, recently—just a couple of dates, a woman Lovett hadn’t met, nothing serious, yet, but—a possibility. He’d only seen a picture on Jon’s phone, over his shoulder, that Friday afternoon a few weeks back when the interns were in a collective state, oohing, demanding to know everybody’s weekend plans. Lovett’s plans for the weekend had been to eat anywhere between three and seven microwave burritos and catch up on sleep. Lovett had glanced at the pic, teased Jon a little, then crossed the room to throw potato chips at Tommy while he tried to puzzle out a Semisonic song on the guitar. She’d looked nice. Really pretty, low ponytail. Jon always had really pretty girlfriends—well, of course he did—and probably treated them all good in bed, just like— _just like this_ , Lovett had thought, stomach clenching: sucking at their nipples with his warm, perfect mouth, scratching their sides while they arched and sighed.  
  
Jon could be kind about anything, because he _was_ kind. He could fuck Lovett nicely right now, face to face, not liking a second of it under the high, under the _have-to-have_ , just thinking conscientiously to himself: _it would be wrong to act disgusted._  
  
“Jon, _please_ no,” Lovett said desperately. _He_ wasn’t kind. _He_ couldn’t look at Jon during and not think—not think things he’d have to contend with later. He didn’t want to. He shoved at Jon’s shoulder until Jon raised his face, finally, body bowed over Lovett’s, and looked down like—  
  
“Not like this,” Lovett said, “I don’t wanna,” and didn’t have to say anymore. Jon looked stricken, like—like he’d remembered where he was.  
  
“Fuck,” he said, thickly. “Lovett, I’m so—”  
  
“Don’t,” Lovett said. He screwed his eyes shut so he wouldn’t have to see the look on Jon’s face anymore, the look that said, you’re right—you’re right—I wish this weren’t happening with you. He tried to think of the right thing to say. It was getting hard to think at all, and when he did speak, the words seemed to trip over each other. “We just have to—we just have to fuck, okay?” He could hear that his voice was crazy. “Okay?” he said.  
  
“I can try again—”  
  
“What—”  
  
“To stop—”  
  
Lovett _did_ start crying a little bit at that. He could feel tears, _fuck, stop, don’t,_ welling up—so fucking embarrassing, Jon trying to wrench back so that Lovett had no choice but to grab his arm and say, “I _need_ you to fuck me, Jon, okay? I need you to fuck me now.”  
  
Jon had stopped struggling and closed _his_ eyes, then. He’d bent down, kissed Lovett’s eyelids, hips still hitching against Lovett’s stomach. “Okay,” he’d said heavily, “shhh. I’ll take care of you. Shhhh,” he’d said, resting his hot cheek against Lovett’s, breathing there for a long moment.  
  
“So you did tell him no,” the nurse said.  
  
Lovett’s head snapped up. “Not like _that_ ,” he said. The nurse’s fingers were poised on her keyboard. “Sometimes no means—”  
  
“Yes?” she said.  
  
“No, we _shouldn’t_ ,” Lovett said. He looked at his knees. “Not, no, _don’t_.”  
  
“Honey,” she said, “I’m not trying to catch you out. I’m on your side.”  
  
“That makes one of us,” he told her.  
  
What was the point of the play-by-play? They’d done what they had to do. Lovett didn’t want to think about it anymore. Jon had rolled him over, he’d tried to be careful, as careful as he could while Lovett was sobbing for it, need like a million pins pricking the inside of his skin, out-of-his-mind begging by the end, the kind of begging that was humiliating even if he could say it was just the—the whatever—just the drugs talking.  
  
“Sorry,” Jon had kept saying, “sorry, sorry, sorry,” while he fucked in superhumanly hard, teeth-rattlingly hard. “I’m so sorry.”  
  
Lovett hadn’t said it back. Jon would have asked, “What for?” and Lovett would have had to watch his face freeze when he answered: “For liking it.”  
  
  
  
Lovett woke up just before nine with a headache and a hard-on. He took three Advil for the first before even getting out of bed and grimly ignored the second until he was practically out the front door, at which point he threw his backpack down with an inarticulate groan and stomped back upstairs to jerk off, fist painfully tight on his dick, as if he could hurt it into submission. Of course he couldn’t. He came, gasping, pants shoved barely halfway down his thighs, thinking about how empty he felt, and about Jon’s teeth on the back of his neck, scraping across the sensitive skin until Lovett had almost shuddered out of his body.  
  
It was enough to put anybody in a bad mood.  
  
He was halfway to the Crooked Media offices before it occurred to him that Jon’s car had still been parked across the street when he left—no—that was lying to himself. He’d noticed. He’d noticed the second he opened his front door, and he’d pretended against it the whole time he was vaulting into his own car, peeling out practically before the driver’s side door was closed, Pundit clambering back across from the passenger’s seat into his lap and knocking her head against the window as if to ask whether he hadn’t made some kind of mistake.  
  
“I know better than you,” he’d told her, “because you’re a dog and I’m a person, and people always know what they’re doing.”  
  
He and Jon usually carpooled, splitting the difference between Jon’s in-before-eight attitude and Lovett’s late-with-a-latte lifestyle, and even if they weren’t carpooling—sometimes one person wanted to hit Barry’s in the AM and the other wanted to sleep the fuck in, what were you gonna do—they tended to be in touch about it.  
  
Well, there’d been enough touching this week to last anyone a lifetime.  
  
At the Starbucks near the Crooked Media offices, Pundit’s favorite barista was on duty, which bought Lovett five minutes or so of lingering, chewing broodingly at the end of his straw, while Pundit rolled around with her paws in the air, whining for treats. “Dignity,” Lovett told her in an undertone, “always dignity,” but she didn’t seem to care. Well, why should she? _Her_ bad behavior got rewarded.  
  
Eventually, when he couldn’t stall anymore, he walked her back towards the offices. He chickened out of actually walking _in_ three times, though. Instead, he kept circling the block, Pundit trotting obediently ahead of him, sniffing the same telephone poles with each turn. It was easy, he kept reminding himself. He just had to act like nothing had happened. He just had to move his mouth normally, say normal things— easy— so easy anybody could do it, even a fucking idiot. Berating himself was familiar enough to be distracting, so that he was feeling—all things considered—ready enough to face the day by the time he actually made it into the office, at which point of course Tommy, barely glancing up from his screen, said, “Fucking finally, I need Favs to look through my interview questions,” and then, actually raising his head, “Where have you guys been?” and _then_ , when Lovett didn’t respond beyond a grunt and a shrug, slinking across the room to his desk and slinging his backpack onto the ground by his chair, “Hel _lo_ , Earth to Lovett. Where’s Favs?”  
  
“I don’t know, Tommy,” Lovett said. He sat down. Someone had been fucking around with his chair. (“They’re _shared chairs_ ,” Jon kept telling him, but everyone _knew_ this was the one he liked.) He fiddled with the lumbar lever. “We’re, like, fully autonomous human beings. That means—”  
  
“I _know_ what—”  
  
“—sometimes he does stuff I don’t know about. And vice versa.”  
  
“You’re in a great mood, huh,” Tommy said flatly. He was wearing that peevish expression that made him look like Kurt von Trapp trying not to cry at dinner.  
  
“Fantastic,” Lovett said. He needed another Advil. “I haven’t seen him,” he added finally, because Tommy was still looking at him, and because he didn’t think he could go all day being mad at himself _and_ having Tommy be mad at him.  
  
“Okay,” Tommy said.  
  
Lovett stared at his email for a while, then scrolled mindlessly through Twitter without even gracing the office at large with his commentary, then slumped over his desk and put his head in his arms, closing his eyes. What he needed to do—it was so simple—was just stop _thinking_ , and _especially_ stop thinking about how Jon, who loved work, and people, and working near people, was apparently so shaken up that he couldn’t even force himself to come in this morning.  
  
He and Lovett had soldiered through some shitty fucking days in the White House. They’d dragged themselves in to write about terrorism and genocide and international crises of all stripes, famine, death, pestilence, war, Mitch McConnell—all the really tough stuff—and Jon had always shown up.  
  
The idea that this—that _Lovett_ —was the bridge too far?  
  
Cool.  
  
“Hey.”  
  
Lovett didn’t raise his head. “Yeah?”  
  
There was a long pause. When Tommy spoke again, his voice was close and measured. “You want me to do the intern rundown?”  
  
The intern rundown was fun. That’s why Lovett liked to do it, usually. You got to draw on the whiteboard, and make the interns draw on the whiteboard, and say stuff like, “Wait, is that a permanent marker!?” and watch them panic. You got to argue your case about coffee orders again and they couldn’t shut you up, or ignore you the way Tanya did.  
  
“Yeah,” Lovett said. His breath was hot against the desk.  
  
“Okay,” Tommy said, and left.  
  
The office was quiet. Lovett could hear the faint sounds of conversation in the conference room. It was funny to think about bridges: to think about Jon as a bridge. Jon would be a nice bridge, a really long, helpful bridge—the kind that looks good from a distance and then you drive onto it, up, up, up its easy slope, and suddenly you’re looking out at water on both sides and the whole thing’s better even than you thought it would be, almost too good to stand. The kind of bridge that takes you somewhere you didn’t know you wanted to go. Only: Lovett wasn’t supposed to _drive_ on him. Or: _Lovett_ was the bridge—definitely a shorter bridge—probably flat the whole way across. And he made _Jon_ do the driving. Jon was, like. A sports car. Or a Subaru with a really fantastic crash rating. Or—  
  
The next thing Lovett knew, people were talking again—no—shouting—and his back was hot, like the sun had shifted to beat in on it, and also his nose was itchy. He raised his head groggily, rubbing at it with one fist. His eyes felt tired, like he’d been crying, which he hadn’t. Hopefully hadn’t. Being a company founder cut you a pretty significant swath of slack in terms of offbeat office behaviors, but sleep-crying would definitely wander into the realm of the unacceptable. And embarrassing. Excruciatingly embarrassing. _Probably hadn’t_ , he reminded himself, and sat back, thumbing gunk out of the inside corners of his eyes, which was when he realized that Jon was leaning against Tommy’s desk, arms crossed over his chest (fuck _off_ ) and that both of them were looking at him.  
  
“Creepy,” Lovett said. His voice sounded rough. “Isn’t there, like. Some treasonous activity you could be monitoring on Twitter? I can’t possibly be the most interesting thing going on in the world right now.”  
  
“You were snoring,” Tommy said. “It was _super_ cute.” He tapped his pen against his knee and grinned across at Lovett.  
  
“Fuck off,” Lovett said, because he had to say something. He tried not to look like he was looking at Jon, who looked—fine. Everything was fine.  
  
“Very small snores,” Jon said.  
  
“Both of you,” Lovett said. “What time is it?”  
  
“Quarter to eleven.” Tommy leaned forward onto his knees. “Jon says the meeting with Larson went okay.”  
  
“What?”  
  
“About the website?” Jon uncrossed his arms. _Finally_. Bad enough having to auto-blur his stupid bulging muscles on a normal day. “That’s why I was in late.”  
  
“Sure,” Lovett said. What had he been thinking? _That the whole fucking world revolves around you?_  
  
“At 9:30,” Jon said. Lovett had a vision, for just a moment, of Jon’s car, still parked outside his house. What time had that been?  
  
“Tell it to your Google Calendar,” Tommy said. “I would _love_ to open your calendar and find your meetings _listed_. Can we work on that? As a company? Alternatively,” turning to Lovett, “you could just be a better social secretary.”  
  
“Favs is the secretary,” Lovett said, but Tommy just rolled his eyes.  
  
“Frankly,” he said, “my life is easier when you two stay attached at the hip, so—no solo ventures, capische?”  
  
“Calendar,” Jon said, “got it.”  
  
“I’m blameless,” Lovett said. He stood up. “Did someone do a coffee run?”  
  
“Yeah,” Tommy said, “but you were sleeping, so—”  
  
“So _what_?” Lovett said. There was, it turned out, a lot of stuff to look at in the office other than Jon—desks, chairs, computers, empty cans of La Croix and Diet Coke, crude caricatures of the three of them that one of the more artistic interns had taken to churning out and pinning around the place. ”So just because I’m sleeping, no one thought to get me a—”  
  
“Yup,” Tommy cut him off.  
  
“This is bullshit,” Lovett said, then cut _himself_ off with a huge yawn. He reached up to stretch it out, braced his hands together over his head, then kept stretching until his arms were behind his back, eyes squinched shut. His body was nothing but knots; it felt good to contort himself a little, hard but good, and he kept leaning into the hurt—stretching harder, farther—until someone shouted, “Catch!” and his eyes flew open.  
  
Nobody was throwing anything at him—Tanya and Sarah were laughing and playing keepaway with Elijah on the other side of the office—and Tommy had wheeled himself away from his desk to egg them all on—but Jon—Jon was still looking at Lovett, gaze intense and unreadable, which was when Lovett realized that his arms were still upstretched, the hem of his shirt raised to reveal a strip of skin around his waist, and that Jon could see—  
  
“Lovett!” Sarah shouted, and Lovett’s head snapped away from Jon’s face to track the trajectory of a rubber-band ball someone had—  
  
“ _Seriously?”_  
  
—pitched in his direction. He ducked, and the ball hit the far wall with an impressive thunk. “For future reference,” he said, heart hammering, “throwing stuff at me is fully homophobic, and therefore a fireable offense, so enjoy my workplace discrimination suit, psychos.”  
  
“Spoilsport,” Tommy said.  
  
“Sorry!” Sarah said.  
  
Jon didn’t say anything. His face, when Lovett chanced a glance at it, was placid again, so unmoved that Lovett might have imagined the frozen moment in which he’d looked—but he _hadn’t_ imagined it. “I have to run out again anyway,” Jon said after a moment, pushing himself off the desk and checking his back pocket for his wallet. “I’ll get you a coffee.”  
  
“I want—”  
  
“I know,” Jon said. He looked fine—fine, fine, _fine_ —the word was beginning to lose meaning—but Lovett knew what he’d seen: the dark bruises where he’d gripped Lovett’s hips inescapably tight from behind, driving into him again and again. And Lovett knew what he’d thought, seeing the evidence of what they’d done: _no_ , maybe. Or: _wrong_.  
  
Had he been grimacing? Lovett felt like he had, but the memory was already hazy, which was fully for the best. Why was he even trying to revisit it? Of course Jon had been grimacing: he’d looked stricken, he’d looked horrified. He’d seen his own fingerprints glaring out at him from somewhere they weren’t supposed to be. What did Lovett _expect_?  
  
“I know what you want,” Jon repeated. He rapped his knuckles against the desk as he moved away, thumping Tommy’s shoulder lightly as he moved towards the door: an easy, familiar gesture.  
  
Lovett spun around in his chair. He bent to scoop the rubber band ball off the floor. “Here, girl,” he said, tossing it underhand into the far back corner of the room, and he watched determinedly as Pundit and Leo raced for it, grappling with each other, until he was pretty sure Jon had gone.  
  
  
  
It was a terrible, awful, no good, very bad month.  
  
It _should_ have been nice. It was June, and the weather was unimpeachable: sunny but not too hot, perfect for light hiking or laying in the backyard with a book over your face. They announced fourteen August-September tour dates and sold them all out within a few days, Tommy brushing his shoulder off when the whole office clapped at the announcement. There were a solid two weeks of political wins—well, anything that wasn’t an outright loss counted at least a little bit these days. Nobody dropped the pee tape. Netflix debuted a new series that Lovett spent one whole Saturday sacked out on his couch binging, and then he mocked up a thinkpiece bingo card and sent it to everybody in the office, which was a fun way to spend the work week that followed. And towards the end of the month, the Starbucks around the corner from the office hired a new barista who recognized Lovett right away, said, “I’m a big fan,” in a tone that— _he_ llo—and kept comping Lovett’s drinks, laughing when Lovett squinted and said things like, “What’s the catch?”  
  
“Do you want me to make you pay?” the guy asked, looking amused. He braced his hands on the counter by the register and swayed forward so that his arms flexed in a way that might, if Lovett weren’t so fucking inured to working under those exact kind of oppressive conditions, have made him feel mildly tongue-tied.  
  
“No,” Lovett said instead.  
  
“Happy to fuel the resistance, then,” the guy said, and winked, and wrote his name on Lovett’s cup next to a little doodle of Pundit’s face.  
  
“Brandon,” he told Corinne back at the office. “Brandon. _Bran. Don._ ”  
  
She looked up from her screen. “What are you doing?”  
  
“Trying to figure out if you can make it sound _not_ douchey,” he told her. “Brandon. Brandon. Brandon.”  
  
Jon and Tommy, who’d been in the studio recording ads and a livestream for most of the morning, emerged just in time to hear his last few intonations, Elijah trailing behind them, face in his phone. “Who’s Brandon?” Tommy asked as Jon sat down on the edge of his desk and started to leaf through his mail.  
  
“Lovett’s new barista boyfriend,” Corinne said, “who he won’t stop jabbering about, even though I have a deadline—”  
  
“Ooh,” Elijah said, looking up from his screen, still texting.  
  
“Boyfriend?” Favs said, at the same time Lovett said, “ _Not_ my boyfriend,” and then, too-fast, “But he’s _very_ into giving me freebies.”  
  
“That’s called flirting,” Tommy said. “Have you forgotten about flirting?”  
  
“I _know_ it’s flirting,” Lovett snapped. “I’m considering whether I _want_ to be flirted with.”  
  
Tommy shot him a skeptical look. “How picky can you afford to be? When was the last time you got laid?”  
  
Out of the corner of his eye, Lovett saw Jon freeze for a millisecond, then keep paging through the sheaf of mail. “What a succinct and humiliating point, Tommy,” he said evenly. “When you put it that way—Brandon. _Brand_ on. Brandon. There are worse names.”  
  
“Any port in a storm,” Tommy said, and wandered off to the kitchen with the air of someone who thought he’d been a big fucking help.  
  
Where, Lovett thought feverishly, turning to stare unseeing at his computer screen, refusing to look over at Jon’s desk, did Tommy get off calling people bitchy little dilettantes when _he_ was such a—  
  
“I wanna see a picture,” Elijah said.  
  
Lovett was gonna burn the damn building down. “I don’t have a _picture_. I’m not a _creep_.”  
  
“You should get on Grindr.” Elijah leaned a hip on Lovett’s desk and picked up a stress ball—where the fuck had that even _come_ from—kneading it in one hand and shooting Lovett a look. “You should get on Grindr and see if he pops up when you’re in there tomorrow morning.”  
  
“Thanks, but I’d rather die,” Lovett told him.  
  
“You _are_ old,” Elijah said, like there was nothing to be done about _that_ , “but—”  
  
“Elijah—”  
  
Elijah put the stress ball down. “I’m just saying. Live a little.”  
  
“Say elsewhere,” Lovett snapped. He couldn’t even enjoy it when Elijah shrugged, raising his hands in surrender, and left. He could _feel_ Jon not looking at him. It was a physical sensation, like a heavy hand on the back of his neck, holding him pricklingly in place. It was unbearable.  
  
Anyway, things only got worse from there.  
  
Sure, the weather was nice, but who cared? Lovett spent practically the whole month cooped up in his house, pretending not to be home when Jon texted to say things like, _Want to go see Ocean’s 8?_ Well, yeah, Lovett _did_ , but not with _Jon_. He didn’t wanna spend two hours in a dark theater sharing a bucket of popcorn with _Jon._ He possessed a scant handful of self-preservational instincts, thanks. Same again when Jon lingered by Lovett’s desk as he headed out on a Friday night, saying, “Supposed to be nice tomorrow. I told Tommy he and Hanna should come over and use the pool.”  
  
“Fun,” Lovett said. “I have a thing with Spencer.  
  
“Bring him.”  
  
“Yeah, maybe,” Lovett said, and slumped back in his chair with a groan once Jon made it out the door. Like hell could he _actually_ hang out with Spencer under these conditions—Spencer who’d said, the very first time Lovett ever mentioned Jon, “Oooh, the hot boss,” and hadn’t stopped making cracks since. But it would’ve been too weird to hang around the house alone all day, knowing that the three of them were just across the street, splashing and laughing, rubbing sunscreen into each others’ backs and lying around half naked, fit and tan and beautiful. He took Pundit out hiking instead.    
  
The fact was, things with Jon weren’t normal. _If I’m doing it wrong,_ Jon had said that night, but he wasn’t. He _wasn’t_. That was the worst part. It was all Lovett. Jon was being fine, completely fine; he didn’t even get cagey after the fourth or seventh or thirteenth time Lovett blew him off, just kept smiling and saying, “sure,” and, “next time,” and, once, “Mr. Popular,” when Lovett faked approximately his zillionth extracurricular obligation.  
  
_You can just call me an asshole,_ Lovett thought, but Jon didn’t even look like he wanted to. “Hey,” he was saying a second later, “did you see what Maggie Haberman tweeted—” and they were on safe ground again.  
  
The two of them weren’t driving to work together anymore. Lovett had started running again, made a big deal about it in the office so that Jon knew he’d be doing his own thing in the mornings. It sucked. It made his knees hurt, because, it turned out, he was thirty-fucking-five, and he had shin splints, and sometimes Pundit begged to come and he had to pick her up and carry her five minutes in. “I’m gonna get you a BabyBjörn,” he told her grimly, and self-flagellated for a half mile about how LA had gotten its hooks in him.  
  
The only nice thing about the running was that while it was happening, he couldn’t think very much at all—mostly just _breathe in, breathe out, don’t trip_ —which was a pleasant change of pace for about a million reasons.  
  
Every now and then, though, even that single feature broke. He’d catch a glimpse of some guy jogging in the opposite direction, and they’d give each other the mutual up-down, and he’d think, if I were anywhere between six and sixteen years younger, we could—my house is just around the corner—and then, like electroshock, the sudden insistent memory: _this is a body that Jon touched._ If he jogged up to this guy and said something blunt and psychotic like—how did people pick each other up these days—”Going my way?” That was definitely wrong—regardless—if he said the _right_ thing—if he took this guy back to his house, hauled him up to the bedroom, sucked his cock, fingered himself open, got on his hands and knees and let a stranger go to town—  
  
Then Jon wouldn’t be the last person to have touched him anymore. In the shower, Lovett would look down and think, someone else put his hands there. Someone else came inside me. Someone else.  
  
Maybe that would be a good and healthy thing—to let his body be something other than a pristine memorial to the time his best friend fucked him.  
  
Whatever. He was thirty-five. He wasn’t gonna fuck some stranger who shared his running route anyway.  
  
He shifted his eyes away and kept moving, every time.  
  
Everything was awful. Nobody would stop talking about sports. Tanya got too into the French Open; Sarah got too into the Stanley Cup; and the Lakers and the Celtics both made it to the Conference Finals, so the whole damn office went bonkers for basketball, even Elijah, who, when _et tu’_ d, just shrugged and said, “Basketball is fun to watch. It has a brisk tempo, and if you get bored, you can sweep the stands for celebs.”  
  
“Judas,” Lovett told him, watching Jon and Tommy lean together over Tommy’s monitor in happy conversation about—free throws, or point percentages, or fouling, who knew. Not Lovett. It wasn’t Lovett’s thing.  
  
“Hey,” Jon said later, “you gonna come watch the game tomorrow night?”  
  
“It does _sound_ like me,” Lovett said. “Unfortunately, I’ve gotta stay in and wash my hair.”  
  
Jon laughed, kind of. After a too-long pause, he said—as if he couldn’t quite decide whether it needed saying—”Well, if you do decide to join, we’ll be over at Tommy’s. His TV’s bigger, so—”  
  
“I bet it is,” Lovett said brainlessly. _Shit_. He caught himself before he could flinch, but the words hung between them for a second, Jon’s face impassive, before Jon shook his head, half-grinning, and spun round to answer a call from the other side of the office.  
  
So he _had_ noticed. Well, of course he had. He wasn’t dumb.  
  
What Lovett _should_ do—  
  
He gave it a lot of thought.  
  
He didn’t mean to. He was trying near-constantly to _stop_ thinking about it. The solution was too clear to avoid, though. If he were a good friend, he’d march into Starbucks, lean on the counter, say, “Hey—Brandon, right? You got any plans this weekend?” Or he’d jog across the road one of these mornings and fall into step with some decently attractive guy wearing an LA Big 5K tee with the arms cut off. He’d say something like, “Come here often,” or, “Nice guns,” or—what _ever_ , he’d think of _something_ to say. He’d haul the guy home, throw him down on the floor of the foyer, straddle him and sink defeatedly onto his dick. And then later—after the sex—they could go out for dinner. They could see a movie. In the office the next day, Lovett could say, “The funniest thing—” and explain, with a raucous performance of a story, that yes—he’d gone on a date—he’d nailed down a boyfriend—  
  
“That’s so great,” Jon would say, meaning it, and turn back to his computer, and breathe a deep sigh of relief. A _boyfriend_. How fucking great would it be for Jon if Lovett could bag a boyfriend? Some walking, talking symbol of the fact that Lovett _got it?_ That he was over it, that he wasn’t gonna be weird anymore? That he never thought about what had happened—like—ever?  
  
If Lovett were a good friend, he’d do something like that.  
  
But he didn’t.  
  
Whatever.  
  
It really was a terrible month.  
  
  
  
It was Jon’s idea to throw a Crooked Media Fourth of July barbecue, but it was Tommy’s idea to throw it at Jon’s house. “You have a pool,” he said, slouching back in his chair and crossing his legs at the ankle. “Seems like a no-brainer.”  
  
“I was thinking your place,” Jon said. He double-tapped something on his iPad screen before glancing across the table at Tommy, face frank and unconcerned. “I mentioned it to Hanna the other night and she sounded like—”  
  
“Yeah, she wants to have a party,” Tommy said. “But come on. You have a grill, too, and we don’t. Lovett, tell him.”  
  
“What, nobody wants to argue for my place?” Lovett said in lieu of going to the bathroom and sticking his head in a toilet.  
  
Tommy rolled his eyes. “I’d like to see your face if I tried.”  
  
“Sure,” Jon said finally, and grinned. “I’m not cooking the burgers, though,” he added, and then he and Tommy were off on some long argument about meat, both pretending not to notice when Lovett rolled his eyes and thunked his forehead against the table in protestation.  
  
In another world, Lovett thought, staring cross-eyed at the tabletop and considering potential escape routes, Jon’s parents had probably invested in orthodontics, squeezed his pre-teen teeth until that goddamn gap was gone. In _that_ world, it must be easy for people to see his smile and shrug it right off; to tell him things like _no_ ; to find him off-puttingly, unpleasantly perfect. In this world, though, Lovett had, in simpler times, gone months at a stretch without once entertaining a thought about Jon’s whole—thing—and then fielded the full force of that smile just once, just for a moment, and had to grimly reset the counter.  
  
“Lovett,” Tommy said, “you wanna write up the invitation?”  
  
“Not my circus, not my monkey,” Lovett said.  
  
“It _is_ your circus,” Tommy said. “It’s an official company event.” He narrowed his eyes. “A _mandatory_ company event,” he added pointedly, and then, “Which means you’ll be there, right?”  
  
“I was gonna—” Lovett started.  
  
“You _will_ be there,” Tommy said. “What’s with you this month? You’re being super weird.”  
  
“I was gonna—” Lovett started again, stubbornly.  
  
“Weirder than usual,” Tommy said, and frowned.  
  
“It’ll be fun,” Jon said. When Lovett forced himself to look over, Jon was looking back. He sounded earnest in a way that made Lovett wanna crawl out of his skin, walk till he hit water, fling himself in, and never come back. “Come on,” Jon said. “Before the summer gets really busy.”  
  
_Don’t look at me like that_ , Lovett thought fiercely. He wondered sometimes if Jon knew that when he asked for things in that tone, that it-would-mean-so-much-to-me tone, he always got them, no matter how little Lovett wanted to give in, to be one more person kneeling at Jon’s feet, offering up anything—everything—if it would only make him happy.  
  
He _had_ to know. That was why he used it so infrequently, and only for things that really— _fuck_ —mattered.  
  
“Yeah,” Lovett said, and kicked his heels against the legs of his chair. “I’ll be there.” He flicked his phone on so that he didn’t have to keep meeting anybody’s eyes.  
  
It wasn’t that Lovett had thought he’d be able to steer clear of Jon’s house _forever_. It was just that after such a good run, he’d thought he might improbably, miraculously, make it all the way to September, and that by then, the changing season—the shorter days and cooler nights—might make it _feel_ different. That he might be able to trick himself into thinking, _I’ve never been here. This is new. This is a place where nothing has ever happened to me._  
  
Instead, when he sloped across the street the Sunday of the barbecue, he was fighting not to get knocked flat by a big fat wave of deja vu, gaze catching on Jon’s front door and holding. The crowded blooms on the bird of paradise _did_ look like a flock of cranes, swaying to stare at the stoop, then at Lovett, then back, as if to say, startled and accusatory: _you again!_ And then he was seeing it all from the outside, the whole crash in excruciating slow motion: Jon holding Lovett’s face in his hand, dropping to his knees, kissing the tip of Lovett’s cock and taking it desperately into his mouth—  
  
_Enough_. Enough, enough, e _nough._  
  
He went around the side of the house to the party instead.  
  
He was almost an hour late. “I figured you’d flaked out,” Tommy said, passing him a beer as he unclipped Pundit’s leash and watched her— _traitor_ —beeline across the yard towards Leo. Tommy was wearing swim trunks, a pair of sunglasses pushed up onto his head, and he had the damp, pink look of someone who’d refused to wait a minute between slapping on sunscreen and jumping into the water.  
  
“You look like a douchebag,” Lovett told him, but he took the drink.  
  
Jon was busy being hosty: making the rounds, chatting with people’s partners, throwing his head back every now and then to laugh the long, braying laugh that Lovett could use to ID him in a billion-person lineup. That was good. He caught Lovett’s eye from the other side of the pool and waved. Lovett waved back. Easy. And everyone was outside, which was good, too, because there was nothing—nothing to think about out here. Just a deck and a pool and a backyard in which nothing weird had ever happened, even if Lovett _had_ once dreamt about Jon pushing him into that pool, jumping in after him—  
  
He didn’t think about that dream, Jesus Christ. He _didn’t_.  
  
Lovett drained half the beer in one long gulp and did some mental calculations about the safest possible place to position himself for the duration. Elijah was laid out by the pool, shielding his eyes with his hand, apparently half-listening to a nearby conversation. His phone was resting on his chest. There was an empty lounge chair next to him. Lovett grabbed another beer and headed determinedly in his direction.  
  
The problem with repression, he was realizing, was that it worked great right up to the point that you ran out of storage space. Then it turned into a game of fucking whack-a-mole—hammer one unwelcome thought down, watch another pop up across the lawn in response.  
  
“Hey,” he told Elijah, swinging into the chair next to him.  
  
Elijah tipped his head over. “Oh, hey,” he said. “Say hi.” He flipped his phone up off his chest and pointing the camera at Lovett’s face.  
  
“You can’t _possibly_ be filming me already,” Lovett said. “Like, physical impossibility.”  
  
But Elijah grinned, flicking his screen with one finger, then turned the phone around so that Lovett could see his own incredulous face gaping energetically back at him in a long loop, over and over. “You’re welcome,” he said, and turned the phone back around to post it.  
  
It turned out to have been a good place to station himself. People kept swinging by to chat and check in, which was Lovett’s preferred way to experience a party: holding court. Most of them could be convinced, with enough whining, to go grab him another beer or a plate of pigs-in-a-blanket, which was nice too because it meant he could stay settled in with the fence at his back and no chance of a sneak attack. And Jon kept getting caught in conversation on the other side of the yard, and up on the deck, eventually, when he and Tommy cycled back into arguing about how long to cook a Bratwurst or—whatever it was that straight men argued about the second they had lighter fluid and an industrial-sized spatula in hand.  
  
“I love watching straight men grill,” Elijah said happily. He sat up in his lounger to take a video, then settled back with a sigh. Brian had brought both of them burgers, and even gone back twice, for mustard and pickles, without making much of a fuss. Elijah kept dipping his chips in ketchup, which was gross.  
  
“Yeah,” Lovett said, staring up at the deck. Despite his protestations, Jon was manning the grill. Unlike Tommy, he wasn’t dressed to swim. He was wearing shorts and a v-neck, holding a bottle of beer loosely by the neck and gesturing with a huge pair of tongs as he talked to Tommy, who was leaning on the railing next to the grill and nodding. If he wasn’t careful, he was gonna forget which hand was which and spill the beer on himself. Any minute now, probably. Stupid. His dumb shirt was gonna cling to his dumb chest. Everyone was in their swimsuits anyway, laughing and friendly—no one would care or comment if Jon shrugged amiably, whoops, put the tongs and the wet bottle on the side of the grill, pulled his tee off and just—was it safe to grill shirtless or...  
  
Lovett set his own beer down. He settled his plate in his lap and took the top bun off his burger, methodically removing the pickle slices Brian had strewn atop the cheese, even though Lovett had _said_ on the _side_ , and arranging them in a neat arc along the edge of the plate.  
  
“Sausages,” Elijah said.  
  
“What?”  
  
Elijah was still looking up at the deck. “When straight men look so serious,” he said, “about handling meat, and they keep asking you how you want your sausage done— _that’s_ what I love.” He bit into his burger, glancing over at Lovett. “Your turn,” he said thickly, chewing.  
  
“I can’t believe you leave the pickles on,” Lovett said instead.  
  
“What,” Elijah said, “instead of whatever obsessive-compulsive routine you’re—”  
  
“Pickles are slippery,” Lovett said. “ _All_ they do is undermine the structural integrity of a sandwich.”  
  
“They taste good,” Elijah said.  
  
“Of _course_ they taste good,” Lovett said. “On the _side_.” He took a bite of his burger, picked up a slice of pickle, and, waving it demonstratively at Elijah, popped it into his mouth mid-chew.  
  
“Ew,” Elijah said, then, fervently, “I wish I could be filming you all the time.”  
  
“ _Yeah_ you do” Lovett told him, still chewing.  
  
“Ew,” Elijah said again. He cast a yearning look at his phone. When he took another bite of his burger, the top bun squidged to one side and—God, you could do _everything_ wrong and the universe would still reward you sometimes—two pickles slid out onto Elijah’s bare chest. There was mustard all over his chin.  
  
“Not to say I told you so, but I absolutely told you so,” Lovett said. “I should take a picture of _you_ right now.”  
  
“Good luck,” Elijah said thickly, and rubbed his forearm across his face.  
  
On the deck, Jon took a deep swig of his drink, chin tipped up, long throat working as he swallowed, then frowned down at the grill, poking something with his tongs. He had beckoned Tommy closer for a consult, and their heads were tipped close together, bent towards the grate, their brows immoderately furrowed: the same faces they used to make in the White House about actual international crises.  
  
In another world—what was the point in thinking stuff like this? Why couldn’t he stop himself?—Tommy had probably been the one on Jon’s front stoop that night. That would’ve been—easy, Lovett thought bleakly. He could feel himself frowning up at the deck and tried to stop.  
  
If Jon and Tommy had gotten hit with a big dose of mindwhammy sex drugs, they’d be _fine_. They would have been fine. It would have been so give-a-bro-a-hand normal. “Sorry, dude,” Jon would have said earnestly, getting a fist around Tommy’s dick, “I can’t help myself,” and Tommy would have shrugged, biceps flexing as he shoved a hand into Jon’s shorts, too, saying, “It’s chill, man, same. Hey, I love you, buddy—”  
  
“Love you too, dude—” Jon would have groaned—  
  
“Your turn,” Elijah said again. He’d eaten the pickles off his chest, but when he tipped his head towards Lovett, there was still a smudge of mustard on the underside of his chin.  
  
“My turn what,” Lovett said.  
  
Elijah gestured at the deck. “Your favorite part,” he said, “of the, like, trying-to-do-it-like-my-dad grill guy routine.”  
  
Lovett shifted in the lounge chair, drawing his knees up to his chest. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t have a favorite part.”  
  
Elijah looked unimpressed. “Come on.”  
  
“I’ve genuinely never thought about it before,” Lovett said. He shoveled a handful of chips into his mouth, the kind of gesture he thought oughta definitively say _I don’t wanna talk about it_ , but Elijah wasn’t the kind of guy to take a hint.  
  
“Come _on_ ,” Elijah repeated. “Gimme _something_. The fact that they can’t do it without seventeen professional consults? The way they squint down like—?” He did an impression of Jon’s intent face that, under other circumstances—say, a couple of months ago—Lovett probably would have found hysterical. He would have filmed it. He would have made Elijah post it to the Insta for everyone to see.  
  
Instead, he worried his toe between two of the plastic slats of the deck chair and said, “Elijah, if I got worked up over a couple of guys grilling in shorts in LA, I’d’ve been in a coma within a week of moving out here.”  
  
“Right,” Elijah said. He drew it out a little, cast Lovett a sidelong glance. “But, like...if they’re _really_ cute guys.”  
  
“Really straight guys,” Lovett said, probably too sharply.  
  
“Eye candy knows no sexual orientation.”  
  
“Really your bosses,” Lovett said.  
  
Elijah threw a pickle at him. “If _you_ asked,” he said, “do you think they’d do, like.” He twirled his finger a couple times and quirked an eyebrow.  
  
Lovett was definitely, one hundred percent, no questions asked gonna fire Elijah on Monday, and he didn’t care what kinda lawsuits he got hit with as a result. “No,” he said firmly. He took a bite of his burger. It was hard to swallow. His mouth felt dry, and cut-up from the chips. “Don’t harass the talent,” he added, doing his best to sound blithe.  
  
Elijah grinned. “But I get _paid_ to harass the talent,” he said. He raised his phone and took another picture of Lovett, who tried to protest mid-sip and just ended up almost choking.  
  
“Asshole,” Lovett said once he’d coughed it out. Elijah had leaned hard out of his chair to pound on Lovett’s back. He kept thumping, laughing, even when Lovett said, “Oh my God, you psycho, enough; if you wanna beat your boss up, pin my picture to a pillow like a _normal_ person—”  
  
“I saved your life,” Elijah said, examining Lovett’s face and, apparently satisfied that he wasn’t on the brink of death, rubbing his back one last time before pulling away. “You owe me.”  
  
“You _wish_ ,” Lovett said. He reached up to massage his throat, coughing again. When he glanced towards the deck, eyes watering, Jon was— _please don’t—_ watching him, but by the time Lovett had scrubbed a hand across his face again to fully clear his vision, he’d turned towards the open door to the kitchen to call something into the house.  
  
“Yup,” Elijah said. “As expected—from the back, too.”  
  
“Gimme your beer, you floozy,” Lovett said. “You’ve had enough, you’re a menace,” and told himself not to look at the porch anymore, and held his mallet at the ready.  
  
  
  
By the time the sun had started to set, shadows lengthening and rippling across the water of the pool, Lovett was drunk, which he knew because Elijah said it—“You’re drunk”—and Lovett said, “I’m not,” and then Tanya said it too, “You _definitely_ are,” laughing from Lovett’s side, where she’d flopped down minutes earlier. She tipped her head onto Lovett’s shoulder. One of her legs was braced on the pool deck.  
  
“Well, maybe,” Lovett said, “but don’t tell anybody,” and squinted up at the sky. It was ludicrously pink, huge and clear on one side and spotted on the other with a million tiny clouds, like a school of soft, white fish, swimming out to sea.  
  
The plan had definitely been to get—not drunk. To not get drunk. There was a reason you didn’t do shots before, like, a test, or before marching into battle—well—he was pretty sure you didn’t, at least these days. Maybe in ancient Greece, or Rome, getting a buddy to buckle your sexy war skirt on, or tighten the straps of your—uh—breastplate—maybe _then_ you would’ve had a swig of something strong before marching off to be run through with a sword. Lovett would’ve, anyway, if he’d been a Roman soldier surrounded by all those hand-to-hand combat hunks—  
  
“—Lovett,” Tanya was saying. “Lovett. Lovett.”  
  
“I can hear you,” Lovett said. Who _cared_ if he was drunk? What did it even matter? Jon hadn’t come near him all afternoon. Lovett could have been a stop sign for all the attention Jon was paying him.  
  
“Corinne told me you have a,” lowering her voice so that Lovett almost couldn’t hear her, “ _cruuuuush_ —”  
  
“No, I don’t—”  
  
“—on a barista—”  
  
“—yes,” Lovett said, flexing his hand against his thigh, “definitely yes, on a very cute barista. But it’s star-crossed, and I’m way too sad to talk about it.”  
  
“Bullshit,” Elijah said idly.  
  
“Bullshit,” Tanya echoed.  
  
“Super sad,” Lovett said. “Can’t date a fan. Unethical. Tragic. Nobody talk to me about love again for a full year.”  
  
“...Lovett,” Tanya said. Her voice was very serious. “I really really really really really really _really_ think you need a boyfriend.”  
  
“I’m getting him on Grindr,” Elijah said. When Lovett glanced over, he was waving Lovett’s phone in Tanya’s direction, the pink of the sky glinting off its screen.  
  
“Hey,” Lovett said, “give that back,” but Elijah just shrugged and unlocked it. “You shouldn’t even know my password,” Lovett told him, holding his hand out. “Come on—”  
  
“I have to know your password,” Elijah told him, swiping at the screen, “because you’re a dumbass. What if you got run over by a bus? Someone has to be able to get into your phone and delete your nudes.”  
  
“I don’t have any nudes,” Lovett said.  
  
“I think that’s an objective correlative, dude,” Elijah said.  
  
“Don’t call me dude,” Lovett said, and dropped his hand.  
  
From the deck, the sound of the back door swinging open. “Hey,” Tommy called out, “last men standing—we’re all inside now.”  
  
Yeah—the backyard was pretty empty at this point. Lovett let himself fall to one side and tipped his head back until the world turned upside down. Tommy was leaning on the railing of the deck; his face looked soft in the low light.  
  
“And _women_ ,” Tanya called back.  
  
“We’re having jello shots,” Tommy said. “And cake.”  
  
“What kind of cake?”  
  
“Funfetti,” he said, and then, “Lovett, Jesus, don’t fall and crack your head open.”  
  
“I’m not,” Lovett said. “Gonna,” he added with dignity, and carefully tipped his head back forward. His temple was throbbing a little.  
  
“Well, I’m gonna have a jello shot,” Tanya said, standing up so that suddenly there was plenty of room for Lovett to shift over and settle comfortably back.  
  
“We’re gonna finish this first,” Elijah said.  
  
“I could want a jello shot,” Lovett said, frowning.  
  
Elijah looked up from the phone. “Yeah?” he said as Tanya made her way around the pool and up into the house. “Suddenly you actually wanna hang out with…” He paused delicately. “Everybody?”  
  
It was like a full bucket of ice water over Lovett’s halfway-to-wasted haze. “Glug,” he said, tongue suddenly huge in his mouth. When he tried to correct himself, though, no words, for once, came to mind. “No,” he said finally.  
  
“Yeah,” Elijah said, “I figured. Whatever, dude, I’m not asking.” He kept typing on—fuck—Lovett’s phone—whatever. Lovett didn’t have any deep secrets you could find in a phone. He was good, at least, about not writing his shit down.  
  
The sky kept darkening—pink to magenta to a kind of deep, pulsing purple that improbably made Lovett’s head stop hurting so much.  
  
“Should we show your face?” Elijah said after a while. “Do you want—like—privacy?”  
  
“...What else am I gonna show?” Lovett asked, but Elijah just snorted, unimpressed.  
  
“You have a super normal body,” he told Lovett matter-of-factly.  
  
“Please,” Lovett said, “stop. I’m blushing.” He wiggled his toes, stared past them at the still mirror-surface of the pool. “Does it,” he said after a moment.  
  
“What?”  
  
“—work?”  
  
Elijah looked over again. He was worrying at the side of the phone. “For sex?” he said, in a tone that seemed humiliatingly to call the question naive. “Uh, yeah. Your, like, next door neighbor’s probably on Grindr. You could be fucking him five minutes from now.”  
  
“Favs is my next door neighbor,” Lovett said before he could stop himself, but Elijah just laughed. “I mean, I know how Grindr works, I’m not _ninety_ , I’m—”  
  
“ _I_ don’t know—’’  
  
“—asking if, like—”    
  
“It’s not like I’ve ever seen you _date_ someone—”  
  
“ _That_ ,” Lovett snapped, and winced, thunking his head against the plastic straps of the chair back. “If it works for—the dating part.”  
  
“...What is _up_ with you?”  
  
What a stupid small question about a big damn problem. “I know how Grindr works,” he said again, instead of trying to tackle it. “It’s just been a while.”  
  
Elijah raised Lovett’s phone and took a picture unexpectedly. It was dark enough that the autoflash went off. “What’s a while?”  
  
“ _A while_ ,” Lovett said. “I don’t wanna be third degreed about it. And don’t take weird pictures of me where I’m gonna have a double chin.”  
  
“Well, if you’d pose instead of lying there brooding—”  
  
It was fine for Elijah, Lovett thought, giving up and allowing himself to be ordered around for the camera, to say things like _what’s a while?_ He probably thought there was a nice simple answer, which would be—”seriously? With my feet in the water?”—great, it would be great if there were. Last month there _would_ have been, even if it wasn’t—didn’t—even if it was pathetic, okay? Lovett thumped down onto the side of the pool and slid his legs into the water, leaning back on his hands and staring off at the horizon. Elijah probably had really normal boy problems. Maybe a will-they-won’t-they; maybe an on-again-off-again. That sounded nice. Lovett wouldn’t mind having a problem like that instead of—  
  
The back door opened again. “Can you try to look—” Elijah was saying.  
  
“No, I can’t ‘try to look’—”  
  
“What’s up out here?”  
  
Lovett was looking over at the deck before he could stop himself, or at least bridle the movement, make it slower—less attuned and less clearly caring. Jon had wandered to the top of the steps and was standing with his arms crossed, expression unclear through the dim twilight.  
  
“We’re gonna start a write-in campaign to get Lovett on Out’s Most Eligible Bachelor list,” Elijah said. “Lovett, come on, _smile_.”  
  
“Take me for what I am,” Lovett said. Jesus, he _was_ still drunk—if he’d sobered up, he woulda stopped staring at Jon by now, and he definitely wouldn’t be fixated on his calves, which were—just _calves_. Lovett kicked moodily at the water.  
  
“ _Nice_ ,” Elijah said, crouching lower to get a shot from below. “Fine, maybe I was overlooking the, like, sulky bad boy angle—”  
  
“Elijah,” Lovett said, “you coulda been a paparazzo in another life.”  
  
“There’s still time—”  
  
“Did you guys want cake?”  
  
Lovett raised his eyes past Jon’s thoroughly unremarkable calves, up his—equally unremarkable thighs—it wasn’t even worth pretending to himself—up his whole, ha, completely, absolutely unremarkable body—“We’re all having cake,” Jon said, arms still crossed. “Inside.”  
  
“Tommy told us,” Lovett said. “We’re trying to get a money shot.”  
  
“...A what,” Jon said. _Go_ away, Lovett thought, flexing his fingers against the rough cement of the pool-deck.  
  
“Favs,” Elijah said, “come down here and help, I’m trying to take a picture that says—”  
  
“Tommy’s gonna give a speech,” Jon said abruptly.  
  
“A what,” Lovett said.  
  
“A speech—”  
  
“I heard you—”  
  
“Can you just come inside,” Jon said, “and you can—you and Elijah can do—this—later—”  
  
“Nice,” Elijah said again, voice strangely faint and far away, “you look really—”  
  
“Now,” Jon said, and then, “Lovett—”  
  
“Whatever,” Lovett said. He raised one leg completely out of the water and smacked it down so hard that the splash hit the other side of the pool. Then he clambered to his feet, holding a hand out towards Elijah for his phone, and trailed his way towards the back door, watching the ground beneath him darken where he walked, water dripping from his legs. He could hear Elijah following behind.  
  
Up on the deck, Jon was holding the door open. “Hey,” he said as Lovett wiped his feet, careful and conscientious in that slow way that meant he needed a glass of water, a couple of painkillers, and to go to bed, “I—”  
  
“Hey,” Lovett said, cutting him off, and went into the house.  
  
There was laughter coming from the living room. Lovett went to the sink instead, rinsed out his beer bottle, then filled it with water, listening as Elijah came through the back door, then Jon after him, closing it tight, trapping them—  
  
He had to get a grip. He _had_ to. “We’re in the—”  
  
“Yeah, the living room,” Lovett said, not turning around. He took a swig of slightly sour water from the bottle and stared determinedly out the window. “I’ll be there in a sec.”  
  
Trapped. Trapped. Trapped. Jesus. He should’ve said— _I have to go home. I have to feed my dog._ Useless excuse—Pundit was probably curled up on the couch already, the happy recipient of about a million snuck bites of bratwurst, full and sleeping on the couch where—on the couch where Lovett had—where Jon had—  
  
Lovett took another long sip of water. He leaned on the edge of the sink. The back of his neck was hot; he reached thoughtlessly back to press the bottle against it before realizing that the heat was just Jon, looking, and pulling up so quickly that he spilled on his own shoulder. His hands were unsteady. It was easy for him to think _go away_ about most people; it wasn’t easy to think it about Jon. Under Jon’s gaze, he could feel his whole body warming, blooming, asking, a long, thoughtless _yes, please_. It was trying to want him gone that felt wrong, which was the whole problem. He stayed frozen, shoulder blades prickling, until he heard Jon turn to leave, all the light going out of the room with him.  
  
In the living room, everybody was laughing. The party had shrunk somewhat—what time was it, even?—and Tommy had his feet up on the coffee table, one arm around Hanna, head tipped back to say something to Jon, who was leaning against the mantel, slowly peeling the label off a bottle and nodding.  
  
“Okay,” Lovett said loudly, “I’m here, Tommy, you can do your thing.”  
  
“My what?”  
  
“Your thing,” Lovett said, looking at the arm of the couch and then—the better part of valor—dropping to the floor next to Tanya instead. “Your—fearless-leader, we-few-we-merry-few thing. Your—” when Tommy just kept squinting, tugging Hanna close and massaging her shoulder, the gesture thoughtless and domestic in a way that made Lovett feel small and prickly—“big, rousing, patriotic, God Bless America, boats-against-the-current, once-more-unto-the-breach, the-work-we-do-here-is-important grand finale speech. Thing.”  
  
Tommy pulled a face. “I’ve had like four jello shots,” he said. “I can’t give a speech. Do you wanna give a speech? You can give a speech.”  
  
“...No,” Lovett said. Jon, when Lovett glanced up at him, was still peeling the beer bottle. He caught Lovett’s eye and shrugged, then raised the bottle to his lips and looked away.  
  
Tanya was telling a long story about the San Diego Zoo. Lovett had heard it before. The room was too cold after being outside all day, and Lovett’s forearms were goose-pimpling. He _should_ have gotten a slice of cake, which at least would have been something to do with his hands that wasn’t—he realized that he was peeling _his_ beer bottle too, and stopped abruptly, setting it down and crossing his arms instead.  
  
“Lovett,” someone said. When Lovett looked up again, Corinne was leaning off the couch, waving her hand to get his attention. “Elijah says you have _glamor shots_ now.”  
  
“Yeah,” Lovett said. He rubbed at his arms. “They’re very here’s-to-you-Mrs.-Robinson.”  
  
Corinne wiggled her fingers. “Gimme,” she said.  
  
“No.”  
  
“Lovett—”  
  
“No way—”  
  
“My _art_ ,” Elijah said, “share my _art_ —”  
  
“What do you need glamor shots for?” Tommy asked.  
  
Lovett scowled. “I don’t,” he said, and then, “Some of us are still, like, single, so—”  
  
“Oooh,” Tommy said, smirking. Fucking douchebro. “Yeah, okay, I give, I wanna see how Lovett’s gonna bring all the boys to the yard.”  
  
“ _One_ boy,” Tanya said. She reached out and socked Lovett in the arm. “Lovett,” she told the room, “is looking for _love_.”  
  
“On Grindr,” Elijah said.  
  
“In search of the one _or_ the one for tonight,” Lovett amended, and even though everybody was laughing, thought instinctively, immediately: _too loose_.  
  
“Pics,” Tommy said, holding out his hand.  
  
“Pics,” Hanna agreed, tipping her head onto Tommy’s shoulder.  
  
Jon didn’t say anything.  
  
It was—infuriating, actually, Lovett thought suddenly, staring at Jon’s bare feet, at his toes curled into the rug, the whole afternoon catching up to him in a rush as he watched Jon shift. He strained his ears to hear some familiar response— _‘Yeah, I think your DC dating routine of videogames and hot pockets is gonna be a big hit in LA, buddy—’_ but it kept not coming. Jon stayed silent, picking at the label on his beer, knocking it audibly against the mantle now and then.  
  
It was one thing to avoid Jon; it was another entirely, Lovett was realizing, to feel like he was being avoided back.  
  
“You don’t need to get on Grindr,” Corinne said. “You’re not gonna find a date on Grindr—”  
  
“You _could_ —”  
  
“ _Someone_ could,” she said. “Lovett won’t. We all know people, we should just set you up.”  
  
“Set me up,” Lovett said blankly.  
  
“Sure,” she said. “Someone in this room could already know, you know, the guy for you.”  
  
“Ooh,” Tanya said.  
  
“Ooh,” Elijah said, in a voice Lovett trusted about 200% less.  
  
“We could set you up on a _bunch_ of dates,” Corinne said. She sounded like she was already mentally organizing a new Google Calendar. “A date a week. And then we’ll debrief you—”  
  
“De _brief_ me—”  
  
“ _Yeah_ we will—”  
  
“Right,” Jon said suddenly, “but when are you even gonna find the time?” He set his beer bottle down on the mantle with a clunk.  
  
Lovett could feel something pounding in his temple. _You’re not allowed to sit this shit out_ , he’d been thinking a minute earlier, and now—“The time?” he said, toneless.  
  
“To date,” Jon said. Then, stiltedly: “A guy a week.”  
  
“...I don’t know,” Lovett said. “When does Tommy find the time to—”  
  
“Careful—”  
  
“Be a loving and considerate partner?”  
  
“ _Thank_ you,” Tommy said. Lovett pretended to puke in his direction.  
  
“Tommy is—”  
  
“Or you,” Lovett said. _Drop it. Shut up. Don’t—_ “You date. Have you forgotten that?”  
  
“I’m just saying,” Jon said, “that I barely—that you’re barely around recently, so—”  
  
Lovett could hear someone else jumping in—maybe Tanya—but he couldn’t hear what she was saying. His head was pounding. He wanted to say _what the fuck,_ but for once his mouth was moving slower than his brain. It was just—  
  
There was a sudden bark from the couch. When Lovett cut his gaze across, Pundit had woken up and was batting at Leo’s face. She barked again, short and sharp, and then howled thinly before lying back down, resting her face on her paws. _Don’t even_ , Lovett thought, staring at her, _you have no_ idea, and tried to glance away again, but now that he’d let himself actually look, his gaze was—stuck—  
  
The room felt small all of a sudden.  
  
The couch. The couch the couch the couch the couch the _couch_ , the fucking _couch—_  
  
“You _have_ been pretty squirrelly this month,” Tommy was saying, in that tone that made him sound like a fucking referee, eminently reasonable. “Are you gonna get a boyfriend and move to Barbados?”  
  
“Am I gonna—”  
  
“ _Yes_ ,” Jon said, “thank you, that’s what I’m—”  
  
“What’s your damage, Heather?” Lovett snapped, and wrenched his head around to look at Jon, whose face was stormy, and who stopped talking as soon as Lovett turned towards him, his mouth snapping shut. Jon had the kind of face that wasn’t meant to look mad—even scowling, he looked more hurt than heated, which was fucking—stupid—stupid and unfair—because—  
  
Of course I’m not _around_ , Lovett thought fiercely. It was almost a relief to feel indignant instead of confused. What kind of bullshit callout? What kind of dirty laundry on the table move? Barely _around_? Jon wasn’t even doing him the fucking courtesy of answering, of saying, “Sorry guys, I have a headache,” of saying, “Just pulling your leg,” of telling everybody: _don’t worry, I still like him. He’s still my friend._ His face was drawn and shuttered, mouth tight at the corners. It was awful to look at him. He was so handsome, Lovett wanted to barf.  
  
He glanced back at the couch instead. He wasn’t sure what he’d expected—that it would be a relief? It wasn’t. For a moment, everything was normal—Corinne was nudging Elijah, the two of them watching Jon with rapt, anticipatory expressions—and then they both seemed calmly and apologetically to disappear, so that the couch was empty. The way it had been that night. And—yeah—there they were, stumbling into frame, Lovett pawing frantically at Jon’s chest, kissing him and kissing him and kissing him, humiliatingly desperate, pressing Jon inexorably towards the couch, bearing him down onto its soft cushions, fevered and demanding and drugged and—loving it.  
  
If it had happened in Lovett’s house—if it had been _Lovett’s_ house—he would have burned the fucking couch. He would have upended a bottle of—what did he keep around the house that was flammable—vodka? Fuck it. He would have found a way, right there in the middle of the living room, to set it on fire rather than live with it, rather than look at it every day.  
  
That or—so much worse— _fuck_. He can _see_ himself tripping down the stairs in the morning, meaning to leave, car keys in hand, eyes catching on the couch instead and suddenly he’d be—ashamed and out of control—walking into the living room, already shoving a hand into his pants, falling forward on the couch and jacking himself, face buried in the cushions, imagining Jon’s hand heavy on his back. Pressing him down. Saying—  
  
“Sorry,” Jon said. He didn’t sound it.  
  
Whatever. It had been different for Jon.  
  
Lovett shook his head a little. His eyes were stinging; he blinked it away.  
  
“Can I talk to you,” he said, already standing up. “In the kitchen.”  
  
“Mom and Dad are fighting,” Elijah said, _sotto voce,_ somebody murmuring a response that Lovett couldn’t make out. He thought about flipping everybody off, but he was so tired, suddenly. It seemed like a lot of work. He just crossed the room, kept his hands at his sides, and didn’t look back, refusing to think about what would happen if Jon didn’t follow.  
  
  
  
Jon did.  
  
“What’s up?” he said, arms crossed, loitering near the fridge.  
  
“What do you mean what’s up?”  
  
Jon shrugged, an awkward gesture, his body clearly unused to the sulky teen shtick—more Lovett’s arena, usually. He looked closer to sullen than Lovett had ever seen him. “I mean—”  
  
“Don’t be deliberately obtuse,” Lovett said.  
  
“I’m not,” Jon said.  
  
“Yes, you _are_.”  
  
“What do you want?” Awful; abrupt. _A time machine_ , Lovett thought wildly, trying to stare Jon down and squinting away after barely a second instead.  
  
“You said,” he said. He wished he was still holding a beer instead of clenching his fists at his sides. People didn’t talk enough about how useful it was to have a prop in situations like this. He took a gulping breath. “You told me to tell you if you weren’t being normal. And you’re _not_.”  
  
“No, _you’re_ not,” Jon snapped, like he’d been bottling it up, which he _had_ been, Lovett had _known_ that. He’d chosen to ignore it, all of it: the way Jon had invited Lovett over to his place, out for drinks, again and again and again, grimly undeterred in the face of Lovett’s glib dismissals, hovering near his desk anyway, almost too trusting and determined even to look at, desperate to make things better—to make them the way they were—waiting on yes after yes that Lovett had no intention of coughing up.  
  
“I’m being fine,” Lovett said.  
  
Jon laughed, a clipped, unhappy sound, nothing like his usual head-thrown-back bray. “I never see you anymore,” he said. “Do you have any idea how that feels, to do something like—”  
  
“Don’t—”  
  
“—that, to have you _say—_ ”  
  
_“_ I said,” Lovett said, “ _don’t_.”  
  
“ _Fine_ ,” Jon said sharply. He’d uncrossed his arms, one big hand braced against the countertop now, knuckles white, his long fingers splayed across the dark granite. The things Lovett would let Jon do to him… fucked up. It was fucked up. Some nights as Lovett was trying to fall asleep, the whole thing playing like a movie in his head, he wondered what he would’ve done if, right in the middle, the drugs had worn off—if Jon had still wanted—no—needed it—but Lovett had been able to walk away. “You said we were fine,” Jon said, “but you’re avoiding me.”  
  
Stayed. He would’ve stayed.  
  
“Please,” Lovett said. “You could have come over anytime this afternoon to say—”  
  
“Bullshit—”  
  
“—hi—”    
  
“Bull _shit_. You didn’t _want_ me to,” Jon said. “Maybe I _am_ being weird tonight, but you’ve been weird for _weeks_ , and I don’t know how—”  
  
“Well, maybe it’s harder for me,” Lovett snapped.  
  
Jon stopped talking. He looked—Lovett’s stomach was churning—like he’d been slapped, like he was trying to take it cleanly. He worked his jaw a couple of times, then stopped, raised a hand, scrubbed it hard across his face, air going out of him in an audible rush so that his shoulders were slumped and small-looking. “Sorry,” he said roughly.  
  
Lovett wanted to cry. Instead, he stared at the wall behind Jon and tried to think about unrelated things—tacos, congressional law, the leaky faucet in his bathroom—anything that wasn’t Jon, standing there, listening to Lovett practically admit that he’d liked it, he’d liked it, he’d _liked_ it; that he couldn’t stop thinking about it, wanting it; listening to Lovett say, _I’m hooked on you. I can’t get over it. I’m the problem._ He half-wanted to do the kind of psycho melodramatic shit you’d roll your eyes at in a movie: say something like, “Go ahead, hit me.” Only of course he’d really be saying _put your hands on me—_ which, fuck, he wanted, he wanted so badly—there was no fucking way around it.  
  
“Not your fault,” Lovett said finally. His legs felt unsteady. When he looked around for somewhere to sit, the kitchen table seemed far, so instead he just scrubbed a hand through his hair, took a couple of deep breaths. “I’m the one who’s—”  
  
“Don’t,” Jon said flatly. He tightened his mouth in the kind of smile you’d toss a stranger with a vaguely familiar face. “You apologizing is weird even under the best of circumstances, let alone—”  
  
Lovett raised his hands. “Hey,” he said. “Don’t have to tell me twice.”  
  
“Listen,” Jon said.  
  
“Seriously,” Lovett said, “ _seriously_ don’t. I just need—”  
  
“Anything—”  
  
“Space,” Lovett said. It sounded so heavy. He’d known Jon for so long now—he’d shouted for Jon to leave him alone, or let him work, or stop being distracting about a billion times. It had never once sounded like this. “The final frontier,” he added, trying to leaven it, but Jon’s face got even stranger-looking. “Come on, you gotta get that _.”_  
  
“Star Trek,” Jon said. “I’m not an idiot.”  
  
“I meant—”  
  
“Yeah,” Jon said, cutting him off like he didn’t want to hear the rest. “I know. I do.”  
  
"And anyway, I'm going to be going on all these dates, apparently, so I won’t be around that much anyway," Lovett said. He didn't know why he was still talking, his mouth seeming to run on without his permission. "With Elijah's professional content management skills, I could have a whole harem to contend with. TMZ will start writing up my exciting life."  
  
“Sure,” Jon said. He crooked his mouth in a tired half-smile and looked at Lovett, finally, his eyes dark and kind. “But who on earth is gonna be able to handle your ego?”  
  
“ _That’s_ what I’m talking about,” Lovett said. He smiled too, even though it felt unnatural, and thought about his bed, about how he was gonna crawl into it as soon as possible and never ever ever ever climb out again.  
  
  
  
There were mean things you could say about Jon if you worked at it, but you couldn’t call him inconsiderate: he really tried to do right. He stopped asking Lovett to hang out; stopped texting to say things like, _Ordering Thai, want anything?_ or _You_ _watching Westworld tonight?_ When Lovett glanced too-casually through the living room window towards Jon’s place, his car was gone more often than not—spending more time over at Tommy’s, Lovett figured, or. The woman he’d been seeing.  
  
When Lovett really thought about it, which frankly he’d been trying pretty damn hard not to, it didn’t seem impossible that the whole thing could’ve—what—shifted that into high gear. Jon had always fucked around—well, _look_ at him—but he wasn’t the kind of guy who’d ever acted like that was the plan forever. He wanted to settle down some day. He went into everything—sex, dating, whatever—with his eyes open to the possibility of a happy ending.  
  
Even with—even when he’d—even after the Incident, Jon had put his head down and taken run after run at the best case scenario: both of them shoving it into the trauma hole, letting things go back to the way they’d been before.  
  
And at the end of the day, Lovett was the one who’d dug his heels in and said: _they never will._  
  
Whatever. Jon’s dating life was probably great these days. Lovett really figured it was. He’d probably fucked Lovett and thought, okay, I’m ready for commitment now. I’m ready to never do anything like that again.  
  
Lovett didn’t go on any dates.  
  
Elijah had tried. Corinne had tried. Tanya had rolled her eyes but also said, “Would it be the _worst_ thing in the world if you just gave it a chance?”  
  
“Yup,” Lovett had said, and deleted Grindr in front of them, waving his phone showily around, _observe: the hat is empty,_ while Elijah groaned dramatically and pretended to collapse in frustration on the floor. Jon had been working nearby, but he hadn’t even looked up, and he hadn’t come by later to lean on Lovett’s desk, either, enticingly louche, arms crossed, biceps bulging, slim fingers fiddling with the wrinkled fabric of his rolled-up sleeves; to look down at Lovett with his dark, too-knowing eyes; to say anything like, “Not looking for a boyfriend after all, buddy?” or, “Not even, like, a hook-up?” or, uncrossing his arms and reaching down to grip the edge of the desk, eyes half-shuttered, lashes unbearably long as he looked out from under them, “You’re gonna get lonely—”  
  
Cut, cut, _cut._  
  
Okay.  
  
The thing about Jon giving him space...  
  
Lovett had assumed it would help. It hadn’t been a crazy thing to think: Jon’s whole painfully-normal shtick hadn’t been doing jack to fix shit, and his pick-a-fight, any-fight blow-up had been even worse. An even-keeled, all-parties-on-the-same-page ceasefire—a time-out, an opportunity to breathe—it _should_ have helped. Lovett had really thought it would.  
  
More fucking fool him.  
  
Sure, it had sucked to slink around in constant anticipation of the next time he’d have to tell Jon _no_ ; the next time he’d look up from his computer and find himself confronted with Jon’s determined face, his maybe-next-time face, his fucking everything’s fucking fine face. That had been shitty. But not having _any_ of Jon’s attention— _never_ looking up to find Jon’s eyes on him—  
  
It was like wearing a shirt with a tag that itched sometimes, and then, upon cutting it out, realizing the cut tag itched even more, all the time—being unable to think about anything else. It was excruciating; it was unbearably distracting. Lovett wasn’t _used_ to wanting Jon’s attention and not reaching for it. It was the least natural thing in the world.  
  
He spent a lot of time jerking off.  
  
In retrospect, maybe he should’ve seen that coming. He should’ve seen it coming from a long way off. It was funny to think that he’d ever seen himself as having the Jon situation under control, when it seemed clear now that he’d spent most of his adult life in thrall. He hadn’t meant, exactly, to build a life so inextricable from Jon’s, a life in which there was almost no part of his day that Jon didn’t touch, or didn’t used to. But he had built that life, and he’d liked it; he’d gotten used to it. So of course if Jon wasn’t gonna look at him, or smile at him, or say, “How was your weekend?” or say, “You down for sushi later?” or say, “I’m your friend—I’ll be your friend no matter what,”— if he was gonna deny Lovett all the, it turned out, countless attentions he’d become accustomed to—( _you_ told _him to, idiot!_ )—well, Lovett’s brain was apparently gonna do its damndest to make sure Lovett got some kind of fix.  
  
The fix it seemed to have settled on was fantasy: relentless, toe-tingling, tooth-grinding fantasy. What did it matter if Jon wasn’t gonna stop by Lovett’s desk to ask what he was doing for lunch, or lean over Lovett’s shoulder to watch a CNN clip, breath hot and close to Lovett’s face? Lovett could _imagine_ it. He could _imagine_ Jon settling a heavy hand onto the back of his neck, flexing his fingers and laughing a little as Lovett twitched under the touch, turning to whisper low in Lovett’s ear, “I’ve got something I can feed you—”  
  
Okay, so Fantasy Jon wasn’t always _smart_ —he had some distinctly PornHub-informed qualities—but he wanted to fuck Lovett. That was the salient part. _Real_ Jon was doing a great fucking job of leaving Lovett completely alone—apparently it was easy—but _fantasy_ Jon—  
  
Fantasy Jon kept knocking on Lovett’s door, asking to borrow a cup of sugar, and the cup of sugar was Lovett’s cock. Fantasy Jon came up behind Lovett, calm as anything, while he was staring into space and failing completely to respond to Tanya’s fifth URGENT: ACTION REQUIRED email of the day, and said things like, “Meet me in the studio, five minutes,” or even just, “Bend over,” which Jon wouldn’t ever say— even if he _did_ wanna fuck Lovett again— which he didn’t, and never would. Fantasy Jon liked to saunter on-screen as Lovett was trying valiantly to fall asleep, take Lovett’s hand, drag him across the road, back through the whole long slog of the summer, and kiss his neck while they watched it together: real Jon cupping Lovett’s face in his hands. Sinking to his knees. And inside the house, a hand braced on Lovett’s back, fucking into him, sweaty and shaking. “You’re really slutty for me,” he said conversationally. “And like. Convenient, you know? I’d fuck you again if you asked.”  
  
Fantasy Jon was an asshole. _Real_ Jon was an asshole for— what— listening to Lovett? Leaving him alone? Leaving him alone with this?  
  
Lovett was the asshole, probably. Whatever. He jacked off to all of it anyway. He was losing his fucking mind.  
  
July was so hot that it would’ve been hard to think even if his personal life was going great. Jon and Tommy swanned around in shorts and muscle shirts, flexing their pecs at each other, seeming totally at home in the heat. Elijah bought a $3 mist fan at CVS and kept sneaking up behind people, spraying them and looking vaguely disappointed when everybody only ever liked it. Lovett, meanwhile, sweated through all his shirts, even when the air conditioning was on, and kept retreating to the conference room to work on the couch, because it was hard to hold his head up through the long, scorching afternoons, and also because—hard truth— being in the same room as Jon sucked. He got used to nodding off mid-afternoon and waking during a social media meeting or conference calls to the sight of Corinne shushing him before he could even open his mouth to yawn or move to stretch.  
  
He wasn’t so used to waking from an accidental nap to find nobody there at all.  
  
It was the third Friday in July. Lovett had fallen asleep while writing out his notecards for the show that night, but when he woke up, someone had taken them, and the uncapped sharpie, too. His mouth tasted sour, and he was hungry, and he had a headache that probably meant he was dehydrated and gonna faint the second he stood up. But the office was quiet—just the buzzing of a fan nearby— and the light was nice, soft and low.  
  
Lovett’s phone was resting face down on his chest. When he turned it over and squinted at it, the clock read 6:07, and he had seventeen texts. Spencer had sent him a slew of increasingly dramatic questions about drinks after the show. Ira had responded to an earlier message with a meme Lovett didn’t, even after a minute’s bleary contemplation, remotely understand—he was gonna get shit for that for sure. And Elijah had texted the entire office a picture of Lovett passed out on the couch, face mashed against his own fist. It was an awful picture. _Tell me this isn’t on Twitter,_ he texted the thread without much hope of having been spared.  
  
Somewhere in the office, a phone dinged.  
  
Lovett was expecting Corinne, or maybe Tanya; maybe both. When he wandered out of the conference room, though, yawning and stretching, wondering if he had another t-shirt in the office—maybe one that wasn’t stiff with dried sweat—there was only one person still working, eyes fixed on his computer screen.  
  
“Hey,” Jon said. He glanced up. “I was gonna wake you up in like—fifteen.”  
  
“Okay,” Lovett said.  
  
“But you’re up now,” Jon said, and cleared his throat. He was really tan, Lovett thought vaguely—all those weekend afternoons by the pool.  
  
“Yeah. Where’s...”  
  
“Everyone had stuff,” Jon said, when Lovett didn’t manage to finish the thought, still sleep-dumb. He shrugged. “I was still working. I said I’d make sure you didn’t miss the show.”  
  
“There’s no show to miss without me.”  
  
Jon smiled. His face looked so… _Snap out of it_ , Lovett told himself, and tried to bring his defense systems back online. It was hard when everything was quiet and soft and slow, and when Jon was looking at him like that, indulgent and familiar. He made himself turn away towards his own desk, where—”I finished your cue cards for you,” Jon said. “I used your outline. Well. I tried. It was a little...”  
  
“Thanks,” Lovett said, staring at the neat stack of pale pink index cards piled in front of his keyboard.  
  
“Sorry if they’re wrong.”  
  
“You’re smart,” Lovett said, and swallowed. His mouth was dry. He needed a Diet Coke, and maybe to shove his head under a tap. “I’m sure they’re fine. It’s not rocket science.”  
  
“Yeah.” Lovett could hear Jon shifting in his seat. “I got you a burrito, too. I wasn’t sure when you were gonna wake up. I mean, I was gonna wake you up, but.”  
  
“Yeah,” Lovett said.  
  
“If you were gonna have time for dinner…” Jon sounded hesitant. “I wasn’t sure.”  
  
There was a white paper bag next to the notecards. Lovett opened it and peered in: burrito, napkins. Can of Diet Coke with lime, sweating like it had been sitting there a while. He set his jaw even though no one was looking and closed the bag back up, carefully folded the top down. “Thanks.”  
  
Jon made a noise that might’ve been acknowledgement. Lovett needed—water. He should just drink water. And he needed an Advil, and to be at the show already, where nobody expected him to be a real person, where he could say any dumb thing and make it a bit, get away with it. “You could’ve just,” Lovett said, scrubbing a hand across his eyes, “woken me up when people were leaving. It wouldn’t’ve been a big deal.”  
  
“Wow,” Jon said.  
  
“What?”  
  
“Your comfort,” Jon said, “wasn’t a big deal?”  
  
“Strike it from the record,” Lovett said.  
  
Jon laughed. He said, “Stricken.” Then: “You’ve just seemed really tired recently.”  
  
Fuck it. Lovett stuck a hand in the bag again, pulled the Coke out, cracked it open and took a long sip. _Yeah_ , he thought, _I_ have _been really tired: it’s because I’m awake most nights imagining getting rawed by a version of you who’s a huge fucking asshole._ What came out, though, too snippily, when he put the can back down: “Well, we can’t all be heat-resistant Californian golden gods like you and Tommy.”  
  
“I’m from Boston,” Jon said.  
  
“You ended up where you were supposed to be,” Lovett said. He took another long gulp of soda. He was the one who was probably never meant to make it to West Hollywood. Whatever. They were in a mirrorverse; that was common knowledge now, in the age of Trump. In the alpha timeline, Lovett was probably in—just Long Island, he thought moodily. And Jon and Tommy were still out here, consulting and backseat-driving the Clinton administration, with a ton of time on their hands for stuff like...Lovett didn’t even know. Probably surfing or something. Something that involved a lot of muscles and getting photographed by tourists at sunset.  
  
He killed the can. When he half-turned to toss it into the recycling bin by Tommy’s desk, he realized Jon was standing, bag in hand. His monitor was dark. “Well,” Jon said, “you’re awake, so.”  
  
Say yeah for the seventeenth time, or—? “Yeah.”  
  
Jon shrugged. “Have a good show.”  
  
“Jon,” Lovett said, leaning on the edge of his desk, “that’s how you jinx it. You know this. Come on. Tell me to break a leg.”  
  
“Break a leg,” Jon told him dutifully, and waved as he left.  
  
The office really _was_ silent after he’d gone. Lovett drank another Diet Coke while standing with his head in the fridge, then ate his burrito, then went to the show, which was fine. It was fine.  
  
He was doing fine.  
  
  
  
Everything came to a head on a Thursday.  
  
It had been a long week. Tour was starting in a couple days, and everyone had been losing their minds sorting out the final details, confirming travel plans and venue arrangements. There was a heat wave rolling through, too; every day for the past seven days had been a scorcher. Lovett had been sleeping badly even with the air conditioning blasting, waking up four or five times a night. And then, to top it all off, they’d spent the last hour of the afternoon recording ads, which had become, over the past month, an excruciating exercise in acting like nothing was up. Mostly, Lovett had gotten pretty good at short stints of play pretend. This time, though—  
  
“Just _try_ ,” Tommy had said between takes. “Can somebody else _try_ to contribute.”  
  
“You’re killing it, Tommy,” Lovett had said, staring determinedly at his phone until Tommy grunted, lunged across the table, and—the element of fucking surprise—snatched it out of his hand. “ _Hey_ ,” Lovett snapped, half-rising. “Give it back!”  
  
“If one of you,” Tommy said, “doesn’t say _something_ useful during this next read, I’m gonna transfer all the company’s assets to an account in the Caymans and take my fiancée on a tour of Europe. First class. And I’m never coming back.”  
  
“You can’t,” Jon said, pulling his iPad protectively close.  
  
“Why not?” Tommy said. “Do _you_ know any of our banking passwords?”  
  
It didn’t matter—nobody could step up to help out anyway. Tommy ended up playing the funny man, the feed, _and_ the indulgent emboldener in a nonsensical ad about mattress firmness. He barely managed to coax a slogan out of Jon and one halfway raunchy remark out of Lovett. The second the ad was over, he pulled Lovett’s phone back out of his pocket and slid it across the table. “I’m not mad,” he said, staring at each of them in turn as he closed his laptop. “I’m just disappointed.”  
  
“He is _definitely_ mad,” Lovett said after he’d left the room.  
  
“Hmm,” Jon said. He poked at his iPad screen.  
  
“...It’s just been a long week,” Lovett said. _Don’t push it_ , he told himself.  
  
Jon looked tired. “Yeah,” he said, still not looking up. “It’s fine. It’ll be fine.”  
  
“I know it’ll be fine,” Lovett snapped. “I wasn’t _apologizing.”_  
  
“I know, Lovett,” Jon said quietly. He kept staring at his screen. His tone was irreproachable. It made Lovett want to fling a fucking microphone at the wall. Instead, when Jon kept scrolling, head down, he wheeled around and stomped out into the office to pack his bag and go home.  
  
Everyone else was packing up, too. Tanya had organized a happy hour, and the interns were loitering near the door like a flock of ducklings, crouched and cooing over the dogs. Lovett had just finished begging off when Jon finally emerged from the studio and crossed briskly to his desk, shoulders uncharacteristically tense.  
  
“Favs,” Tanya said, “you coming?”  
  
“What?”  
  
“To the happy hour. Come on, Lovett bailed—”  
  
“I never said I could come in the _first_ place.”  
  
Tanya didn’t look impressed. “Whatever,” she said. “Don’t complain to me when everybody else in the office is jacked up on team spirit and you’re left out in the cold. Favs?”  
  
“I can’t,” Jon said. “Sorry.”  
  
Tanya narrowed her eyes. “What is the point,” she said, “of planning morale-boosting events if nobody bothers to organize their schedules around them?”  
  
“ _I’m_ coming,” Tommy said pointedly.  
  
“One out of three is _not_ a good conversion rate. Favs—”  
  
“Sorry,” he said again. He genuinely sounded it. “It’s been a really long week.”  
  
“Lovett already used that one,” Elijah said, “and frankly, nobody liked it. What’s up? You have a hot date or something?”  
  
“Nah,” Jon said after the barest pause.  
  
Lovett shoved his laptop into his backpack, then groped around the desk for anything else he might arguably wanna haul home, anything to keep his hands busy, any excuse to keep his head down.  
  
“I’m ready,” Tommy said. Out of the corner of his eye, Lovett could see him slinging his messenger bag across his chest.  
  
“If you’re not gonna come,” Elijah said, “it should at _least_ be for a hot date. Are you still seeing—”  
  
“Now,” Tommy said. He cleared his throat. “I’m ready now.”  
  
“—whatshername—”  
  
“Where are we going again?” Tommy said, too loud, just as Jon said, calm and clear, “No, that, uh. Didn’t work out.”  
  
Elijah was saying something—something normal— _sorry_ or _why not_ or _there’s plenty of fish in the sea_ —but Lovett couldn’t quite track it through the rushing in his ears. _Didn’t work out_. _Didn’t work_ out. _None of your business, don’t think about it,_ he tried to tell himself, but it didn’t matter. Of course he was immediately imagining it: how Jon must have looked, texting—calling—no—meeting her for coffee, maybe, saying, “I’m sorry, we can’t,” saying, “it’s just not a good time,” saying, “I can’t explain. I wish I could. I wish we could—” He must have looked tired, apologetic, raking a hand through his hair, maybe taking her hand across the table. He must have been polite, and kind, and said, “I really wanted this to work out.” Well, in another world it probably had—in a world where Lovett hadn’t been in the wrong place at the wrong time, where Jon had never had to— to touch him, or—whatever. Jon was probably well on his way to marriage, kids, some soft, hazy happily ever after in a world where he and Lovett had never met.  
  
Elijah was still talking; Corinne, too, and, yeah, Tanya—Sarah—and Tommy, voice rising above the rest, “Okay, busybodies, what if you saved the interrogation for another time—” Everybody talking except Lovett, whose hand was—hurting—oh. He was gripping the straps of his backpack so tightly that when he let go, his fingers pulsed painfully and flooded red.  
  
He had to do something. Say something. He had to say _something_ , not that anybody would notice if he didn’t.  
  
When he made himself look up, though, somebody was noticing after all: Tommy was watching him, frowning slightly. As soon as their eyes met, Tommy glanced away, over at Jon. Then back again. He looked—impassive, mostly. A little guilty. A little assessing.  
  
_Oh_ , Lovett thought, just once, very small, even inside his own mind.  
  
It shouldn’t have been surprising. Of course Jon had told Tommy. Jon told Tommy everything, and vice versa. Jon and Tommy were like—a first-order Jaeger team: sauntering lockstep into the cafeteria, peeling off in opposite directions to flirt with their adoring fans and falling seamlessly back in with each other by the buffet, flawlessly in sync, two tall, broad-shouldered, too-handsome supermen who could practically read each other’s minds. Who knew when something had gone wrong.  
  
So of course Jon had told him.  
  
What had Lovett thought—that Tommy wouldn’t notice? Wouldn’t ask? _What’s up with Lovett lately? He’s acting like such a—_  
  
_Freak,_ Lovett thought, _pathetic gay freak,_ and then he was picturing _that_ instead: Jon and Tommy going out after work one night without him, having a couple of beers, reminiscing about fucking—Chicago, Iowa, the campaign trail, bonds of brotherhood, battle-forged, whatever. They’d probably gotten a little drunk; maybe Tommy had said, knocking his bottle against the table, “Hey, what the fuck is Lovett’s deal these days?”  
  
What would Jon have done? Rolled his eyes, probably. Taken a deep swig of his own drink. Said, “You’re genuinely not gonna believe it,” and then, when Tommy quirked an eyebrow like, _try me_ : “It was crazy, seriously crazy, I was just trying to show him some of that HBO paperwork—”  
  
Lovett didn’t wanna think about this anymore.  
  
(Tommy saying, “Wow.” Tommy saying, “That _is_ crazy.” Tommy saying, “Just what he’s always wanted—he’s, like, obsessed with you—”)  
  
“Lovett,” Tommy said, and pretended not to notice when Lovett jerked back to reality. “You ready to head out? We’re all leaving, I’m gonna lock up—”  
  
“I’ll do it,” Lovett said. “I forgot something in the.”  
  
“...Studio,” Tommy said after a long, silent moment.  
  
“Yeah.” Then: “I’ll lock up, I can. I just have to go look for.”  
  
“Something,” Tommy said, and Lovett said, “Just _go_ ,” too sharply, he could hear it as came out, he just needed to not be _near_ anyone—  
  
“Okay,” Tommy said finally, and shrugged, and let him bolt.  
  
  
  
The studio was dark and quiet. Quiet enough. He could faintly hear everybody rallying, picking up their bags, jangling their keys, filing out the front door, until there was silence, broken only by an occasional thump: Pundit still pacing around the office outside. Lovett fiddled with one of the microphones, flipping a switch on and off, on and off, scowling at the table, trying not to think about any of it.  
  
“Hey.”  
  
Lovett’s head shot up so quickly he felt a twinge in his neck. “No,” he said flatly.  
  
“Lovett—”  
  
“ _No_.” He flipped the switch one last time and took a big step away from the table. “What does a person have to do to get a moment alone around here?”  
  
“You looked upset,” Jon said. He’d shoved his hands into his pockets.  
  
“I _am_ upset,” Lovett snapped.  
  
“Because…”  
  
“Because it’s been a long _week_ ,” Lovett said, voice half-cracking as he spoke. What a humiliating fucking tell. “And because I have a headache, and I still have to pack, and it’s—hot out, and because—you broke up?”  
  
“What?”  
  
“With your girlfriend—”  
  
“She wasn’t my girlfriend,” Jon interrupted. “She was a woman—”  
  
“Whatever—”  
  
“—I was seeing, and we aren’t seeing each other anymore, it’s not like—a national emergency.”  
  
“I can’t believe you told Tommy.” Fuck. He wasn’t gonna say that. He _wasn’t_. He had about two fluid ounces of self-respect, he _did_ , he’d been planning on—  
  
“Told Tommy—”  
  
“Don’t play dumb,” Lovett said. Keeping his mouth shut about this—just eating it—that’s what he’d been planning to do. He’s pretty sure. “You’re not dumb. It would be an infinitely fairer world if you were.”  
  
“Okay,” Jon said, and reached up to scrub a hand across the back of his neck. If Lovett ran the zoo, it would be fucking illegal for Jon to touch himself, even just to scratch his nose, under any circumstances. “Yeah. He knows.”  
  
Lovett snorted. “Right,” he said. “He knows because you told him.”  
  
“Right,” Jon said. “Yeah. I told him.” He hadn’t moved out of the doorway. There was no fight in his voice. It was fucking—infuriating, actually, Lovett thought, to be lashing and stinging and hissing and scratching and getting _nothing_ back, nothing but this blank, resigned look that seemed to say: _I finally understand how exhausting you can be_. Well, it had taken him long enough.  
  
“Isn’t this whole thing,” Lovett said, “humiliating enough without other people knowing about it?”  
  
Jon closed his eyes.  
  
“ _Isn’t_ it?” Lovett repeated insistently.  
  
“I don’t know what you want,” Jon said. “What you want me to say. Tommy asked if—”  
  
“Don’t _explain it_ to me,” Lovett said.  
  
“He asked—”  
  
“Whatever,” Lovett said. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t care. If you wanna gossip about me with—I don’t care. I thought you were gonna leave me alone. Just leave me alone.”  
  
“I _can’t_.”    
  
Lovett, who had been staring at the door frame above Jon’s head, froze. His eyes slid down without permission to land on Jon’s face, which was—  
  
“I can’t watch you be upset,” Jon said. He took a step into the room. “I can’t watch and not be allowed to do anything about it.”  
  
“There’s nothing _to_ do,” Lovett said. It was exactly like Jon to think that there must be some clear, secret solution; that if Lovett would just let him in, let him help, he could find a way to fix things. Jon had never in his life encountered a problem he wasn’t ready to take a run at, wasn’t ready to run at _repeatedly_. Jon was a trier. He was a solver. He was hope-and-change, yes-we-can right down to the ground. It was one of the things that made him so stupidly, dangerously easy to love. Lovett swallowed. It tasted strange and sour. “There’s nothing either of us can do,” he said. When Jon opened his mouth like he was gonna argue, Lovett added, “Don’t, Jon. Please don’t. You don’t get it—it’s just easier for you.”  
  
“...What,” Jon said flatly.  
  
“It _clearly_ is,” Lovett said. He set his jaw and resisted the urge to retreat when Jon took another step closer. Jon had, he thought dimly, this strange quality: when he advanced into a dark room, it really did seem to lighten around him. Jon was a joke—or, Jon near Lovett was a joke. It was a joke that any of this had ever happened; that Jon, who was luminous and charismatic and perfectly formed, had ever had to put his hands on Lovett. “You’ve been great,” Lovett said, “at ignoring me so far, so just keep—doing that.”  
  
“What,” Jon said, slowly and carefully, “is _wrong_ with you?”  
  
Lovett could hear his own teeth grinding.  
  
“What is _wrong_ with you,” Jon said again, and then, “I _can’t_ ,” and then, “ _easy_ ,” and when Lovett tried to say, “I’m just saying,” Jon said—another step—“Nothing about this is easy for me. Lovett—”  
  
“I know—”  
  
“That’s why I told Tommy—”  
  
“Don’t—”  
  
“Because you won’t let me talk to you,” Jon said. He’d pulled his hands out of his pockets, couldn’t seem to keep himself from gesturing. “I hate not talking to you,” he said. Lovett tried to look at his elbow instead of his eyes, or his mouth, or his fingers flexing in the air, long and beautiful. “I’m trying. I know you need space. I know you don’t want me around right now. But I hate it, and I’m not good at it, and I can’t do it. I’d rather you just—punched me or something. Can you just punch me and fix it like that?”     
  
“...Punch you,” Lovett said, and must have made a face, because Jon started to laugh suddenly, a choked and unhappy sound.  
  
“I’m sorry,” Jon said, when the laughter stopped. Then, softer— _fuck_ —“I miss you.”  
  
Lovett was pretty sure that if he _actually_ tried to punch something—the wall, maybe, or the floor, or himself, right in the stomach—he’d break his own hand. But it was tempting. It was. “You can’t,” Lovett said, low and furious, “ _say_ stuff like that to me. You can’t. You can’t. You _know_ you can’t.”  
  
“Stuff like—sorry—”  
  
“Don’t say sorry to me,” Lovett said. It was hard to get a breath. “I hate it. I never wanna hear you say it again—okay? Don’t say that you’re sorry, or that you miss me, or that you hate not talking to me—it’s like—feeding a wild animal. Do you get that? You can’t _say_ those things to me because that’s how you foster a fucking— _dependency_. That’s how you convince a raccoon it’s okay for it to come into your house.”  
  
“To come in…It _is_ okay,” Jon said.  
  
“It is _not_ ,” Lovett said, clenching his fist tighter at his side. He wanted to lie down. He wanted to lie down and sleep for a million years, only to find, upon waking, that a race of beautiful aliens had finally come to Earth and crowned Jon their king and spirited him away to Krypton to live forever, far away from Lovett, the way it always ought to have been. “If you’re really sorry,” he said, “you won’t say it. You won’t say it anymore and you’ll leave me alone and you’ll call your girlfriend and you’ll close the back door and turn off the porch light and stop _feeding me_. Okay? Because you’ve already wrecked my life by giving me crumbs from a meal I can’t have.”  
  
Lovett didn’t usually have a lot of trouble interpreting Jon’s face, but right now it was doing something he couldn’t begin to understand. Tired. Tired. He was _tired._ “I can wear a sign,” he said. “If that helps.” Jon didn’t say anything. He seemed barely to be seeing Lovett at all anymore. “And maybe in like—thirty-three years or so,” Lovett said, a little desperately, “I’ll be cured. Okay? And I’ll be able to fuck a Brendon or a Brandon without wishing it were—”  
  
“But you hated it,” Jon said abruptly.  
  
For a moment, the phrase didn’t even sound like English. _But you hated it_ , Lovett repeated in his head, cradling each word like an inexplicable curiosity, examining it from every angle. _But you_ hated _it._ By the time he could make sense of the phrase, his ears were ringing. “That’s crazy,” he said slowly.  
  
“You—”  
  
“ _Incredibly_ crazy—”  
  
“—couldn’t even look at me—”  
  
“—check your temperature, go-see-a-doctor _crazy_ —”  
  
“—you told me to— _Lovett_ ,” Favs snapped. “Shut _up_.”  
  
Lovett’s chest felt tight. “No,” he said, ignoring the order. “ _You_ hated it. That’s what—”  
  
“ _What—_ ”  
  
“—happened—”  
  
“Lovett—”  
  
“You’re straight,” Lovett said, too emphatically. His eyes were stinging. God, he needed to be normal. It would be awful to fly to pieces in front of Favs—if he could just avoid _that_ , at least, if he could just slink out of this with his dignity—who was he fucking kidding? The ship had sailed. “You’re straight,” he said again. “And we got roofied, and you had no choice, and you were nice—”  
  
“ _Nice_?” Jon said. “Stop talking. Seriously, _stop_ _it_ ,” he added when Lovett tried to keep explaining. Lovett closed his mouth. Even _he_ didn’t try to shout Jon down when he sounded like that. “You looked at me like—like you wished it was anyone but me, like you didn’t want me to touch you—”  
  
“Right,” Lovett said. “I didn’t.”  
  
Jon flinched.  
  
“Oh, fuck you,” Lovett said. He couldn’t sort out which parts of him were angry and which were sad and which were—whatever else was in there. “Stop acting like that’s, like—like you can’t understand why I wouldn’t want—”  
  
“I _do_ understand—”  
  
“—you to know how much I could want you?” Lovett said.  
  
Jon stopped talking.  
  
_There_ , Lovett thought. _I said it_. Ten years of keeping that possibility under lock and key—treating it like a joke: _my handsome boys;_ never saying, _I really could be crazy about you if I let myself—_ that was a good run. Most people wouldn’t’ve managed ten months.  
  
“How much you could,” Jon said unsteadily, and fell silent again.  
  
Lovett felt abruptly, incredibly calm—almost numb—and benevolent, somehow, looking at Jon’s furrowed brow, at the tense, searching expression on his face. _Fucking idiot_ , he thought, letting his gaze linger—who cared? There was no such thing as getting caught anymore, and no more hiding from himself. No more pretending against the feeling that was prowling free now, making his heart pound. _Idiot_ , he thought again, and swallowed. There was a lump in his throat. Jon was flushed and his t-shirt was too small for his stupid beefy Barry’s muscles. He’d run a hand through his hair so that, for once, it didn’t look perfect: he looked a little mussed, rakish.  
  
_How could you not know? How could you not_ always _have known?_  
  
“You were the one,” Lovett said, “who didn’t want it. Okay? I’m not blaming you. I get it. You had to do it. You were imagining—”  
  
“You have no idea what I was imagining,” Jon cut him off. Then, tone unreadable: “You liked it. You—”  
  
“Yeah,” Lovett said, and watched, wondering, as Jon seemed to bloom before him, tension sliding off his shoulders, body shuddering free of—Jesus—how could he have _been_ there and _ever_ thought—  
  
And suddenly he was watching it again, for the millionth time, only—it was like someone had cut in a lost camera angle, recolored it, fixed the sound: a full remaster. The lighting was soft, golden twilight, and Jon was rolling Lovett over, trembling with the strain of going slow, shucking Lovett’s sweatpants and saying, under his breath, “Sorry, sorry,” while Lovett buried his face in the couch cushion, refusing to be seen, groaning as Jon rubbed an unsteady hand up the bare skin of his back and trying not to melt beneath the touch. What had he been thinking? _Don’t give it away. Don’t get used to this._ And what had he said, when Jon pressed the heel of his hand into the dip between Lovett’s shoulder blades, feeling like, if Jon leaned a little harder on that spot, something inside him might click and give and never go back again? _“Just—do it already,”_ biting his own tongue before he could start to beg.  
  
And Jon had—  
  
“Lovett,” Jon said, stepping forward—  
  
He had said, “Yeah, o—kay—” and stroked a finger across Lovett’s hole, hand tightening on Lovett’s hip when Lovett convulsed in on himself, shivering and panting wetly against the couch, feverish. Jon’s grip had been too-firm, like he was trying to ground himself, and he’d touched Lovett’s hole again, again, worrying at it until just the tip of his finger was sinking in, stretching the rim but not _enough_ , and Lovett was fucking back in spite of himself, burning up from the inside out, desperate for more. He’d felt himself arching back, tried to make himself freeze, but it was impossible when Jon was pulling away—no, no, _no_ —and then—thank _God—_ sliding one spit-slick finger back into Lovett’s clenching hole, fast and hard. Jon had given him two fingers, three, in quick succession—barely a pause between thrusts—his movements jerky and uncontrolled because he’d...he’d needed it so _badly_ , Lovett realized with a jolt. “Just do it,” Lovett had said again, voice cracking. Jon had flexed his fingers inside Lovett’s ass, then, just once, and Lovett had come suddenly, unexpectedly, taking even himself by surprise, cock jerking violently against his stomach as it went off, striping the couch with come.  
  
“Did you,” Jon had said, breathless. Lovett wasn’t fucking Superman. He should’ve felt limp, shuddery, wrung out. Instead, he’d just felt more turned on, more desperate, saying, somehow wilder than before, “Do it, do it, you have to,” which had been pointless—unnecessary—because something about his coming had made Jon. Something about—however the drugs worked—when Lovett had come, Jon had growled, crowded close against his back, the drugs had made him—when Lovett came—  
  
Lovett could hear his own pulse in his ears. He couldn’t think. He couldn’t _think_. When he’d come. Because of the drugs. Jon had—  
  
“ _I_ liked it,” Jon said, face soft and cracked-open.  
  
—oh.  
  
“Okay,” Jon had said, “it’s okay, you’re okay, we’re gonna be okay.” But his voice had been almost unrecognizable, deep and rough, and as fast as his fingers were gone from Lovett’s ass, his cock was there instead, nudging along Lovett’s crack, hot and slick and seeking. He’d plastered himself against Lovett’s back before Lovett could take a full breath, sucking desperate kisses along the line of his shoulders, the back of his neck, barely wrenching his mouth away to say, shuddery, close to Lovett’s ear, “Sorry, I’m sorry,” before he was fucking in, arhythmically slow, just the tip stretching Lovett’s hole, until Lovett groaned and fucked back. Then he was saying it again, _sorry_ , and cramming his cock in so deep that Lovett couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, still somehow hard—that desperate feeling building again, _sorry_ , biting the back of Lovett’s neck, _sorry_ , hips snapping against Lovett’s ass, _sorry_ , cock hard and insistent inside Lovett, splitting him open.  
  
“At the time,” Lovett said.  
  
“What?”  
  
“You liked it at the time.”  
  
Jon made an inarticulate noise. “You always have to make everything so difficult,” he said, and took a step closer. “I _liked_ it. Period.”  
  
“Well—”  
  
“No _well_ —”  
  
“ _Well_ ,” Lovett said stubbornly.  
  
“Why are you allowed to have liked it,” Jon snapped, “but I’m not?”  
  
“Why am I—because I was _always_ gonna like it,” Lovett said. He took a step back. “If you’d told twenty-five-year-old me there was such a thing as sex pollen, he woulda been under your desk, sucking your dick and blaming it on a weird breeze before you could blink. Stop fucking _advancing_ on me, that’s—”  
  
“Always?”  
  
“—awful, I’m awful—”  
  
“You are,” Jon said, “a _huge_ chore,” and reached out a hand just as Lovett hit the recording table.  
  
“If you touch me with that hand,” Lovett said, “so help me God—”  
  
“What?”  
  
“Just don’t,” Lovett said, grabbing the table behind him and holding on. “I don’t know, I won’t be able to think anymore, it’ll be nothing but humiliating gibberish from here on out.”  
  
Jon touched his cheek.  
  
How had it gone? The secretest, most embarrassing, most impossible version of events? The one he’d tried to lock up, tried never to think about, but still found himself contemplating sometimes, his hand tightening on his dick, stripping himself faster, meaner, the second he let himself imagine it? In some other branch of the multiverse, he’d told himself—stupid, pointless, painful fantasy—there must have been a moment when it all went differently. Jon had been rubbing his face roughly across Lovett’s chest, kissing his small, soft nipples, suckling at them like he couldn’t get enough, and when Lovett had said, “no—Jon, _no_ ,” Jon had raised his head, reached up, stroked a gentle thumb across Lovett’s cheek. He’d said, “Please,” or, “You’re so pretty,” or—God, this was embarrassing—or he’d held Lovett’s face between his hands, said, “I want this, I’ll always want this,” and fucked Lovett like that, naked and close and face to face, sliding in and kissing Lovett’s throat as his head fell back, stroking the lower lip of his open mouth as he groaned, saying _pretty, pretty, pretty_ , and looking at Lovett just like—  
  
Just like this. Just exactly the way he was looking at Lovett right now: like he’d wanted it. Like he’d liked it. Which—he _had_. Lovett had squirmed onto his stomach, looked away, tried to make himself nothing—just a hole, just a happenstance body—but Jon had held him so tightly, kissed his shoulder blades, his trembling arms, the flushed back of his neck—and he’d reached around to grab Lovett’s dick, groaned when Lovett cried out and came again in his fist, like that was good. Like Lovett was good. He’d slid his fingers through the come on Lovett’s stomach and tugged him closer and fucked him harder and he’d _liked_ it, he’d liked it, he’d liked it—  
  
“Humiliating gibberish?” Jon said in a rough, prompting tone. His hand was gentle on the side of Lovett’s face, but firm, too, tilting it up, and he was looking at Lovett, _I liked it_ , his expression— _I_ liked _it_ —hungry, crazy, as he rubbed his thumb at the corner of Lovett’s mouth.  
  
“Uh,” Lovett said, and blinked, and leaned up, and kissed him.     
  
For a moment, it was world, stop: Jon’s hand flexing against Lovett’s cheek, his lips parting barely, almost chastely, against Lovett’s. Then, in a rush, Jon was groaning, mouth opening, and tugging Lovett close, kissing him deep and wild, his hand broad against the small of Lovett’s back; and he was crowding Lovett forward, too, so that there was nowhere for Lovett to go, nothing to do but sling an arm around Jon’s neck, let himself be hoisted bodily onto the table. “Jon,” he tried to say, gasping, when Jon pulled briefly away for air, rubbing his cheek roughly against Lovett’s, sucking— _oh—_ at his earlobe. Lovett’s fingers were tingling.  
  
“You’re so—” Jon said.  
  
“What—?” But then Jon was kissing him again, pulling Lovett close, clutching at his side, kissing him so slick and deep and crazy that by the time he pulled away again, Lovett couldn’t remember—“ _Jon_ —”  
  
Jon was panting. His face was flushed. He thumbed Lovett’s cheek a few times, his expression disbelieving, and then he was stroking down the length of Lovett’s neck. Lovett’s cock jerked as he swallowed convulsively against the weight of Jon’s broad hand, and again when Jon bent to kiss him just below his Adam’s apple. His lips were gentle against Lovett’s throat before he started to suck determinedly at the soft, thin skin. “Shit, Jon,” Lovett said, head tipping involuntarily back as he shuddered into the sensation. Fuck it. He let his legs wrap around Jon’s waist, holding him close; let himself squirm for a little friction, cock trapped tight between them. “You’re gonna leave a mark.”  
  
“I know,” Jon murmured, and bared his teeth a little.  
  
“We should talk,” Lovett croaked. “Should we talk? We _should_ —”  
  
“I have had,” Jon said grimly, “the worst summer of my _fucking_ life,” and pushed Lovett back onto the table, then grabbed his thighs, hitched him closer at the hips, holding Lovett in place and gazing down at him for a long moment. It was too much, Lovett thought wildly. Who could possibly expect him to think or breathe or say anything when Jon was looking at him like that, eyes dark under his stupid-long lashes, or when Jon was holding him like this, tight enough to bruise, _again_ , grip only tightening further when Lovett tested it.  
  
“Weird,” Lovett said, blinking rapidly. “I’ve been having a great time.”  
  
Jon’s face did something quick and complicated. “I’m gonna fucking murder you,” he said, fingers digging into Lovett’s hips. He sounded closer to hysterical than Lovett had ever heard him.  
  
“Ow,” Lovett said, even as his dick jerked in his shorts. “That _hurts_.”  
  
“Good,” Jon growled, and let go to shove a hand under the hem of Lovett’s t-shirt, rucking it halfway up to his armpits and palming Lovett’s pec in the same rough motion.  
  
Lovett made a sound that might, in another world, have turned into a word; in this one, it didn’t stand a chance. Jon was petting his chest, hand heavy and possessive, and saying, in a wild undertone, “Two fucking _months_ —”  
  
“I really,” Lovett said, “do— _ah_ —think I was responding reasonably to the information I had.” Jon was pinching his nipple, rolling it between his fingers. It was like being fucking electrocuted. “At the _time_ ,” Lovett added, and couldn’t stop himself from whining low in his throat when Jon leaned forward and braced a hand by Lovett’s head, face close and intent.  
  
“You’ve never been reasonable a day in your life,” Jon said. He bent his head and bit Lovett’s nipple, then gentled it in his mouth, too sweet, petting Lovett’s side as he suckled. It made Lovett feel too small for his skin, scrabbling uselessly for purchase against the hard table as he arched into the sensation.  
  
“Jon,” he said unthinkingly. He touched the back of Jon’s head just as thoughtlessly, almost hesitant—as if he might still say _no_ , or shake it off—but Jon just groaned, and kept groaning when Lovett cupped his skull, touched the back of his neck, the swell of his shoulders, and when Lovett said, “I couldn’t think straight, it’s not my fault, I couldn’t _think_. How was I supposed to figure out that you—? I couldn’t think about it,” and then, “Are you _sure_ you’re not, like, under the influence of something—”  
  
Jon made an unearthly noise, pulled off so abruptly that Lovett felt his breath catch in his throat, and said, “Don’t even _start_ with me.”  
  
“I’m not _starting_ anything,” Lovett said, and Jon said, furious, “Tell me you want it,” and then, “Tell me you know I want it,” and touched Lovett’s face again; said, “Look at me,” when Lovett tried to close his eyes. God.  
  
“Well, I think—”  
  
“Lovett—”  
  
“I want it,” Lovett said, “of course I want it, I think about it all the time.” Jon made an aborted noise and managed somehow to crowd closer. His hand was heavy on Lovett’s face. Lovett wanted to kiss it, right on the center of the palm, and then crawl Jon like a tree, cling to him, kiss the skin under his ear, stay there with his face buried, hidden, for a hundred years. “How you felt inside me,” he said, burning up about it. “How was I supposed to figure anything out when I just kept thinking about how good your fucking dick felt? PSA: it’s really fucking distracting.”  
  
“God,” Jon said breathlessly. He was clambering onto the table before Lovett had even finished talking, shoving Lovett back, not seeming to notice or care when it creaked dangerously beneath them. His body was warm and heavy on top of Lovett, cock huge and hard in his jeans as he rutted against Lovett’s thigh. He’d barely pinned Lovett for a minute before he was shoving an artless hand into Lovett’s shorts, wrapping his fingers around Lovett’s cock, kissing Lovett’s neck and jacking him. His grip was so tight and relentless and unexpected that Lovett startled and shouted, arching up, and threw an arm out, knocking into something—  
  
“Was that a mic,” Lovett said, feeling around, but it had thunked to the floor.  
  
“Don’t care,” Jon said, kissing him savagely.  
  
“Tommy’s gonna kill us.”  
  
“Don’t _care_ ,” Jon said again. He was trying to wrestle Lovett’s shirt off and keep kissing him at the same time. It was a mess. It was a _mess_. Lovett felt like he was having an out of body experience.  
  
“The Caymans,” Lovett said.  
  
“ _Tanya’s_ gonna kill us.”  
  
“Okay, enough, can you just—”  
  
“I am _trying_ ,” Jon said feverishly, and flung Lovett’s t-shirt away, not pausing for a second when— _you’ve gotta be fucking kidding me,_ Lovett thought—it knocked another microphone off the table and to the floor with a jolting thump.    
  
“Disaster,” Lovett croaked.  
  
“I’m so,” Jon said, face buried in Lovett’s neck, wrapping his fingers around Lovett’s cock and stroking up in the tight space between their bodies, “crazy about you—”  
  
“ _Stop—_ ”  
  
“What—”  
  
“You can’t say stuff like that when you’re touching me,” Lovett said desperately.  
  
Jon froze on top of him, breath damp and hot on Lovett’s neck. Then he wrestled himself up on one hand and said, glaring down at Lovett, “I can say anything I want.”  
  
“Uh,” Lovett said. He felt ineffably cross-eyed.  
  
“You made me stop talking to you,” Jon said. When he said it, it sounded like a Sisyphean punishment. Lots of people, he wanted to tell Jon, in a slow, condescending tone, would _kill_ to be told they never had to talk to him again. That was a fact.  
  
“That’s not how I put it,” he said instead. “It was more like—”    
  
“Don’t ever,” Jon said, staring him down, “cut me out of your life again.”  
  
“Don’t tell me what to do,” Lovett said, but—he should have been embarrassed but the ship had sailed, it had sailed far, far away—he could feel himself melting under Jon’s scrutinizing gaze. His hips were moving without permission, fucking up into Jon’s fist, begging for more, and he kept swallowing hard, blinking too fast, for no reason, no reason except that his whole body was intent on belying his words, on saying: _tell me, tell me—anything you tell me to do, I’ll do_.  
  
“Don’t,” Jon said, gentler.  
  
“I hated it,” Lovett said, shocking even himself. And then they were kissing again, Jon fisting Lovett’s dick, murmuring, “so good,” and, “so much,” and, “mine,” against Lovett’s mouth, even though—fuck, fuck, fuck—he had to be able to feel the way Lovett was jerking in his hand, the way, if he kept it up, Lovett was gonna—”God, you make me—”  
  
“Off,” Lovett said faintly, bracing a hand against Jon’s firm, broad chest and shoving, steeling himself to keep from coming at the sight of Jon’s swollen mouth when he pulled reluctantly back. “Off, off, you have to—”  
  
“What,” Jon said, and bent his head unhelpfully to suck one of Lovett’s fingers into his mouth. _Jesus._  
  
“ _Off_ ,” Lovett hissed, and shoved him again, too hard, so that he did half-fall off the table, shaking his head dazedly, a dumb, stubborn look on his face. “Your pants,” Lovett said, struggling to sit up. “Take your fucking _pants_ off.”  
  
Jon was already unzipping his jeans and shoving them down his thighs. “You too,” he said needlessly: Lovett was stripping his shorts, too, and his briefs, kicking them across the room. He tried not to let himself feel self-conscious, sitting there naked, legs spread, dick hard and bobbing against his stomach. It helped that Jon kept fumbling his job because he couldn’t stop staring, and that he said, “ _Oh_ ,” in a startled, desperate tone when Lovett took his own cock in hand and started to stroke it. He couldn’t help himself. Jon looked so good—beyond good—his arms, the vee of his waist, and his dick, long and thick and _still_ perfect; Lovett hadn’t made that up, that hadn’t been the drugs talking at all.  
  
“You thought about it,” Jon said.  
  
“What?”  
  
“About what happened,” Jon said. “You thought about it, you liked it—”  
  
“Yeah,” Lovett said.  
  
Jon looked so grateful that Lovett almost couldn’t breathe. “Tell me,” he said, and took two steps forward, and dropped to his knees—spread his hands wide on Lovett’s thighs—rubbed his cheek against Lovett’s cock, kissing the shaft and the head, groaning like he’d missed it. Like he’d thought about it too.  
  
“Tell you,” Lovett said stupidly. Jon’s fingers flexed against his legs. He licked a broad stripe up the length of Lovett’s cock, looking up from under his lashes as he mouthed at its head, shivering and sinking forward when Lovett petted his cheek, sucking it into his mouth. He was just as unpracticed as the last time. G _ood_ , Lovett thought fiercely, and kept petting him, fingers trembling, as his eyes fluttered shut. It was impossible that he knew how good he looked like this. If he did—Lovett touched his cheek, closed his own eyes. He wasn’t going to last if he kept looking down at Jon’s perfect mouth, his hollowed cheeks, if he kept listening to the soft, greedy sounds Jon was making. He couldn’t possibly. Not after two months of nothing but his own hand. Not after two months of imagining Jon just like this, on his knees or— pushing Lovett to _his_ knees—or working Lovett open with his long fingers, taking his time, not like before, when it had been so frantic—    
  
Jon pulled off with a wet sound. “Lovett,” he said roughly.  
  
“I don’t know what you wanna hear,” Lovett said, and hissed when Jon sucked hard at the head of his cock, taking him deeper, mouth stretching, hot and wet and almost unbearably good. “That I.” It was so hard to _think_. “Jerked off about you every day,” and yeah, he thought spacily, as Jon wrapped his fist around the base of Lovett’s cock and kept sucking desperately, almost gagging in his eagerness: that _was_ what Jon wanted to hear. “Every day,” he said. “When you did this on your front steps, do you—” Jon was nodding. “All the time. I think about it all the time. I practically can’t see your front door without getting hard. God, I can’t believe you’re making me say this shit.”  
  
Jon mmmed. His mouth, Lovett thought suddenly, was full of Lovett’s cock. He was sucking Lovett’s _cock_. And he was reaching back, too, his fingers wet with spit and pre-come, to rub at Lovett’s hole as he sucked—no clear intent behind it—working just the tip of one finger in, a slow, repetitive motion, while Lovett tried not to fuck up into his mouth, tried not to seem too desperate for more. “When you fucked me,” Lovett said. Jon’s other hand was vice-tight on his thigh. It really did feel like his whole body was going haywire—dick jerking, pulsing pre-come in the slick heat of Jon’s mouth, heart hammering, fingers clenching the edge of the tabletop because if they didn’t touch that, they were gonna touch Jon, and if he touched Jon—and he had a lump in his throat, too, that was hard to talk through. “Never,” he said— _Jon liked it. He liked it. He wants to hear it—_ ”been fucked like that before, that good before,” Jon keening around him, desperate sound _,_ “I had to stop myself.”  
  
Jon pulled off again. It didn’t feel like a punishment this time. He was kissing Lovett’s stomach, the crease of his thigh, kissing the base of Lovett’s dick and saying, “Stop yourself from what,” so that Lovett had to say, “From coming and begging you—”  
  
“God—”  
  
“—to do it again.”  
  
“You’re so,” Jon said, “crazy. You make me crazy,” and finally let his finger slip actually into Lovett’s ass, up to the knuckle, crooking it inside him, something dark and promising crossing his face when Lovett choked and clenched on it.  
  
“You make _me_ crazy,” Lovett said, once he could get a breath. “You should be— _fuck_ , Jon—legally obligated to disclose that you have a dick that—God—makes other dicks seem—”  
  
“Other dicks?”  
  
“—completely unappealing. What?”  
  
Jon’s finger had stilled in him. He was looking up at Lovett with a face that— “Did you,” he said, and then, “If you,” and then, “After we fucked, did you.”  
  
“I _tried_ ,” Lovett said, which he thought he oughta get points for— _I really didn’t mean to be so pathetically hung up on you—_ but Jon just frowned, set his jaw, and tightened his fingers on Lovett’s thigh. “I mean, I thought about...I’m not an idiot. I knew I should just—fuck someone else.”  
  
“...No,” Jon said slowly. “You shouldn’t have. Did you? You shouldn’t have. Lovett—”  
  
“Surprise,” Lovett said, “I suck at Grindr,” and watched as Jon blinked once, let out a breath, and then bent immediately to bite hard at the inside of Lovett’s thigh, holding him down when he yelped and squirmed away from the pressure of Jon’s teeth, his mouth.      
  
“You should have come to me,” Jon said. He turned to nose at the inside of Lovett’s other thigh, pulling his finger out in one quick slide at the same time, so that Lovett was tight with tension, empty and expectant. But Jon didn’t bite him again. He kissed him once, then looked up.  
  
“I couldn’t,” Lovett said, something flipping in his stomach as he thought about it: If he’d crossed the street, knocked on Jon’s door, dropped to his knees when it opened. If he’d begged, right there on the front stoop where it all started.  
  
“You could have,” Jon said. He stood up, hands heavy on Lovett’s thighs as he pushed himself to his feet, so that Lovett was looking up at _him_ again. “You _should_ have.”  
  
“I don’t wanna talk about this again,” Lovett said.  
  
“You should have,” Jon said. He tugged Lovett close, got a hand around both their cocks and stroked once, nuzzling Lovett’s neck, talking so quietly Lovett had to strain to hear him. “If you’d told me you needed it…”  
  
At some point, Lovett thought dimly, Jon was gonna wake up and think—what— _I don’t want this?_ Or _, I want this, but not_ that _much_. “Based on the information _—”_  
  
_“_ I would’ve fucked you,” Jon said, close to Lovett’s ear, warm breath making Lovett shiver involuntarily, “anytime, any place—”  
  
_“_ —I had at the time—”  
  
“—whatever you want, whatever you need—”  
  
“—it wasn’t _crazy_ ,” Lovett snapped, “to think that I should try and fuck you out of my system.”  
  
“ _Yes,_ ” Jon said, low and explosive, “it _was_. No fucking me out of your system. No fucking anybody else,” kissing Lovett, deep and filthy, and then shoving him back again, “when I’m right _here_.”  
  
It was like the last vestige of Jon’s self-control had gone up in flames. His hands were everywhere, rough and possessive; and he bent to rub his face against Lovett’s chest, kissing his sternum, the hollow of his throat, pressing the palm of his hand against Lovett’s cock and pinning it to his stomach. Lovett jerked and cried out. His hips were hitching without permission, canting up against Jon’s hand, his whole body begging, and he was—talking, it turned out, saying _fuck, fuck_ , and, “Jon, please, I need—”  
  
“Anything,” Jon said, glancing up at his face.  
  
“Need you inside me,” Lovett said.  
  
Jon’s hand slipped on Lovett’s cock, and then it was gone completely; gone, Lovett realized, because Jon was grabbing his hips again instead, trying to yank him closer, and, when it turned out there _was_ no closer, making like he might scramble up onto the table again. It creaked warningly under the weight of his knee. “God,” Jon said in a strange, fevered voice. “Lovett, fuck.”  
  
“Can you—”  
  
“We can’t, we don’t even have any—we don’t have anything,” Jon said, but he unclenched one hand from Lovett’s hip, let it slip down until one finger was rubbing across Lovett’s hole again, sinking right back in, and he was tugging at Lovett’s rim, eyes wild and fixed on Lovett’s face. “Fuck. _Fuck._ ”  
  
“Yeah,” Lovett said brainlessly. Even just the one finger felt good. He was squirming without meaning to, trying to fuck forward, trying to get more. “Please—”  
  
“We _can’t_ —”  
  
“A little,” he said, “a little we can, come on, please, I’m asking, I want it.”  
  
“Lovett,” Jon said, voice strained.  
  
“I know you want it,” Lovett said. He touched Jon’s hand where he was digging his fingers into Lovett’s hip. For the first time, he let himself think about Jon, in his house alone, jerking off, frantic and wanting, thinking about _Lovett_. _Wanting_ Lovett to come over, beg for it, say—“I need you—”    
  
And suddenly, Jon was moving, pulling his finger out again, hitching Lovett close and nudging his cock against Lovett’s hole, “just a little,” palming the wet head of Lovett’s dick once and rocking against him; and Lovett was panting, shivering and squirming and clutching at Jon with his knees, and crying a little, too, he realized—his cheeks were wet—grabbing Jon’s bicep, tensing and relaxing as Jon rocked harder and harder. The stretch was good, too good—it hurt a little. Lovett wanted it to. He kept tugging Jon closer, asking for it, until, in a second, Jon’s cock was in, but only barely, just the tip, spreading him open. Jon bent to kiss him, messy and uncoordinated: his mouth and then his wet cheeks, both eyelids, his jaw and his neck and his collarbone. "No one else,” he insisted, in a voice that was half claim and half question.  
  
“Stupid,” Lovett said thickly, and tugged him up by the hair, and kissed him again.  
  
It wasn’t fucking. It wasn’t real fucking, not like before, not Jon in him to the hilt, long, hard, deep strokes. Jon was barely moving—abortive little thrusts that he was visibly straining to control, and the table was creaking beneath Lovett like it might give out at any moment. But it was close, face to face, Jon’s eyes on him, and Lovett felt so full—it was hard to imagine—“Gonna fuck you again for real,” Jon was saying. Lovett, clenching on the tip of Jon’s cock, thought _yeah,_ so grateful and anticipatory that he almost couldn’t bear it. He could hear himself making noises— they seemed to be coming from someone else—could hear himself saying, “More, please, come on,” and Jon saying, “We can’t, we can’t,” rocking into him, “babe, I can’t.” Fuck. Fuck. “I’m gonna get you home,” Jon said, teeth gritted, bending to kiss Lovett’s throat, “and fuck you till you can’t move, honey. Okay? Is that good? Is it good?”  
  
“Yeah,” Lovett said, “it’s good. You’re good.” Jon’s face was so… fuck. Lovett wanted him to always be happy; wanted to always be making him happy. “It was so good, Jon,” Lovett said, low, and watched as Jon froze, almost grimaced, and came abruptly, stuttering, in Lovett’s ass, half-pulling back, groaning when Lovett begged, “Stay in—” He fisted Lovett’s cock as he finished, grip hard, near-painful, so that Lovett gave up trying to hold out and looked at Jon’s face, screwed up in pleasure, and came too, watching vaguely as he shot up across his own stomach. Jon kept stroking him through it, until it was overwhelming, and even then—“Jon,” Lovett said, squirming increasingly desperately until Jon sighed and let go, bending to kiss Lovett’s shoulder.  
  
For a long minute, the studio was near silent. Jon was leaning across Lovett, head on his chest. In for a penny—Lovett stroked his temples, stomach flipping a little when Jon hmmed and nuzzled closer, kissing Lovett’s sternum and sighing. He could feel Jon’s come dripping down his leg.  
  
After a while, when their breathing had settled, Lovett did hear a thump from the main office. “Oh my God,” he said, “the dogs.”  
  
“Mmm?”  
  
“I forgot about the dogs,” he said. “Did the dogs watch us fuck? Jon!”  
  
“Mmm,” Jon said again, and pushed himself up. “Well, they’re gonna have to get used to it.” He glanced around, scratching the back of his head, stretching, looking down at Lovett with a soft, satisfied expression. Jon had the kind of body that could be nude anywhere and make the space seem to sigh and say, _finally_. Lovett didn’t. He was pretty sure, all things considered, that nude and covered with jizz on the recording table wasn’t his best look, but—you certainly couldn’t tell from Jon’s face. “Hey,” Jon said. He smiled, slow and private, and rubbed a hand across Lovett’s stomach even though it was—Lovett’s cock twitched halfheartedly, like it might _try_ —come-splattered and sweaty. Lovett was still figuring out what to say back— _hey_ or _okay, moron_ or _keep me—take me home now—keep me_ —when Jon glanced around again and added, brow furrowed, “What happened to the mics?”      
  
“Keep looking,” Lovett said, and let his head thunk back onto the table—looked up at the ceiling and grinned.  
  
  
  
“Uh,” Elijah said to the room at large the next morning at about half past ten, while Jon was leaning over Lovett’s shoulder, reviewing the pod outline. “I don’t wanna, uh, alarm anybody, but I think there might’ve been. Uh. Like. A break-in?”  
  
“What?” Corinne said.  
  
“ _What_?” Tanya said.  
  
“I don’t think so,” Lovett said, and hooked a finger into the collar of his t-shirt, trying to tug it unobtrusively closer to his neck.  
  
Elijah squinted at him. “Well,” he said, “it’s just that the studio looks, like—”  
  
“We cleaned it up!” Lovett snapped.  
  
“—ransacked, and—okay, if I _noticed_ , clearly you _didn’t_ , and also, cleaned what up, and _also_ who is _we_ —”  
  
“We cleaned it up,” Jon repeated in a tone that managed to sound stern and final for about a second before he broke the spell by smiling, ducking his head to try and hide it, and then, almost immediately, giving that up too. He pressed two fingers to the back of Lovett’s neck, stroking the sensitive skin there so that Lovett shivered and shifted to glare up at him.  
  
“Um,” Elijah said.  
  
“ _...Oh_ ,” Tanya said.  
  
“Dude,” Tommy said, pulling a face. He spun around in his chair to face them. “Seriously? Here? _Seriously_? When you have two perfectly good houses between you?”  
  
Well—fuck it. Lovett leaned back in his chair. Jon’s fingers were warm against his neck, still petting him. He probably thought this was discreet. Jon was an idiot. Jon was—um—Lovett squinted up at him. “I don’t know what to tell you, _dude_ ,” he said blandly, staring at Jon’s stupid, smiling face, ignoring Tommy’s indistinct squawk of a response. “We just couldn’t help ourselves,” he added, and watched, a little smug, a little wondering, as Jon threw his head back and began to laugh.


End file.
